Society Research
Institutional Individualisation? The Family in European Social Security Institutions
12 August 2016, by CGG
Patricia Frericks/Julia Höppner/Ralf Och
Patricia Frericks/Julia Höppner/Ralf Och
Institutional Individualisation? The Family in European Social Security Institutions
Welfare institutions have long been set up in most European countries in ways oriented towards the family as the one basic principle.
Reforms in recent times however have fundamentally changed the conception of the social citizen. Yet social rights are still mainly conceptualised in the literature in terms of employee rights, and family elements are often interpreted as a kind of holdover from the traditional welfare-state policies of industrial societies.
In this contribution we develop a formula for how to make the weight of the family in social security visible and to compare it through the evaluation of the cross-country levels of institutional individualisation. We deliver original theoretical, conceptual and empirical insights into the welfare-institutional order with the aim of furthering the understanding of the current social constitution of European societies. The findings show that the degree to which welfare institutions treat the social citizen as an individual is characterised by high variation and that the results do not correspond to common welfare categorisations.
Frericks, P./Höppner, J. /Och, R. (2016): Institutional Individualisation? The Family in European Social Security Institutions, Journal of Social Policy, 18 pp. (published online).