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PurposeThis paper aims to examine the development of welfare conditionality and especially benefit sanctions in Central and Eastern Europe (the CEE) and to develop a methodology by implementing Institutional Grammar (IG) for studying rules on benefit sanctions relying only on legal text.Design/methodology/approachIG was used as a tool for analyzing legal regulations on benefit sanctions. It was incorporated into a social rights framework that provided a theoretical background for the study.FindingsThe paper shows the dynamic development of rules on benefit sanctions in Poland in social assistance and unemployment services. Both the harshness and strictness of these rules have increased. Simultaneously, the rules of benefit sanctions in social assistance remain more liberal than those associated with unemployment services.Originality/valueThe study presents the first comprehensive and concise overview of benefit sanctions development in the CEE and the first long-term comparison of these types of sanctions in two safety net systems operating in one country. The study also used IG for the first time in social policy research.

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The essential feature of activation turn in labor market policy in Western European countries is reform of the labor administration, which affects the provision and delivery of the policy. The principles underlying governance reforms include decentralization and strengthened coordination, which help to reconcile local flexibility with the national ownership of the active labor market policy. However, few articles examine how these reforms are implemented in Central and Eastern European countries. The activation turn and territorial reforms there took place later than in Western European countries and possibly followed a different trajectory. Based on various materials, including legal acts, public employment services reports, expert releases, and others, the article traces the activation policies' reforms and their impacts on the organizational arrangements in Latvia, Hungary, and Poland. The findings show that some organizational arrangements of the national PES in countries covered in this study predate the accession to the EU. The critical governance characteristics seem to be affected by the general administration reforms. Public employment services in the three countries have different levels of vertical