Young People and Social Policy in Europe

Dealing with Risk, Inequality and Precarity in Times of Crisis

L. Antonucci, M. Hamilton, L. Antonucci, M. Hamilton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137370525
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited collection provides the first in-depth analysis of social policies and the risks faced by young people. The book explores the effects of both the economic crisis and austerity policies on the lives of young Europeans, examining both the precarity of youth transitions, and the function of welfare state policies.

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Introduction: Young People and Social Policy in Europe

Past and Present

Myra Hamilton, Lorenza Antonucci and Steven Roberts

Young people in contemporary Europe face not only a heightened sense of risk (Beck, 1992; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007; Taylor-Gooby, 2004), but also the looming prospect of becoming ‘the first generation to do worse than their parents’. The challenges facing young people as they navigate transitions to adulthood are therefore unprecedented in European societies. Their experiences of risks, such as labour market insecurity and social exclusion across a range of domains, have become increasingly relevant in the media and in policy debates. Since 2008, the economic crisis has intensified the risks experienced by young people in Europe and created new forms of insecurity and exclusion. The austerity measures implemented in several European countries, such as labour market reforms aimed at promoting flexible labour markets (Jessoula et al., 2010; Madsen et al., 2013) and cuts in state support for students in higher education (Callender, 2012), have contributed to this insecurity. Recent studies have shown that young people are a group that is feeling the effects of the crisis and associated austerity measures most strongly (Busch et al., 2013; Dietrich, 2013; McKee, 2012; Theodoropoulou and Watt, 2011). There is therefore a compelling need for reflection upon the efficacy of social policies for young people in times of crisis and the assumptions that underpin them, and for identifying policies that can mitigate, and indeed reverse, the effects of these new risks. This book sets out to address the changed policy landscape and consequent heightened complexity and urgency of young people’s needs.

1.1 Young people in the crisis: new or old transitions?

The need for ‘youth policies’ is not a new focus in European policy-making. Indeed, the 1990s and early 2000s saw youth policy become a burgeoning area of policy formation, with a focus on activation policies, tertiary education (such as the European Commission’s Europe 2020 initiatives), social inclusion (such as the European Commission’s EU Youth Strategy 2010–18) and youth unemployment (the Youth Guarantee, endorsed in 2013). However, while the early focus of youth policy was specifically on young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETs) (Yates and Paine, 2006), there is now increasing interest in ‘young people’ as a whole cohort at risk of precariousness (Standing, 2011) and in young adulthood as a new age group in need of specifically targeted social policies.

In the broad literature concerning young people, there is still an emphasis on situating the current crisis within longer-term changes in youth biographies. In particular, it is still unclear whether the challenges faced by young Europeans in the crisis represent a period effect, and could be considered a repeat of the crisis in the 1980s, or if the processes emerging from the crisis at the start of the 21st century point to new and unprecedented challenges. In other words, there is a need to clarify whether we can really identify a new generation (the Millennial or the Y generation) that faces specific cohort challenges that are different from the ones young people have faced before. In many respects, scholarly debate on the ‘new’ risks faced by young people and the ‘extraordinary’ nature of current transitions has been in place for some time, and has been linked to epochal changes, such as the presence of fragmented transitions in late modernity (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007). We need to be aware that ‘youth studies [ . . . ] has a tendency to highlight change over continuity’, and this derives from the fact that in academia ‘“the shock of the new” grabs more headlines than “same as it ever was”’ (MacDonald, 2011, p. 428). Even if we consider the current challenges faced by young people in Europe to be the effect of longer-term changes associated with the passage to late modernism (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007; Heinz, 2009), there is no agreement on their effects. While some youth scholars have argued that the shift towards uncertain and fragmented transitions creates greater choice and opportunity for young people (Arnett, 2006; Patterson et al., 2009), others have suggested that for many these transitions continue to be shaped by pervasive structural factors, creating vastly different experiences and outcomes (Bynner, 2005; Evans, 2002; Schoon and Bynner, 2003).

There seems, however, to be a consensus on the detrimental short-term effects of the crisis on young Europeans. For Bell and Blanchflower (2011), the effects of the ‘Great Recession’ on the transitions of young people in the labour market are unprecedented, involving underemployment on a new scale. Comparing the effects of the current economic crisis and the 1980s crisis on young people, MacDonald (2011) finds that there are new elements to consider, such as the importance of focusing on young people in the ‘missing middle’ (Roberts, 2011), who are ‘not-NEETs’ and ‘not-troubled’, but who are now also exposed to precarious conditions. This also points to a need to consider university-to-work transitions, rather than just school-to-work transitions (Macdonald, 2011). Similarly, Furlong, Woodman and Wyn (2011) believe that the contemporary reconfiguration, both culturally and structurally, of educational and labour market conditions has created a generational problem that affects all young people, not just those at the bottom. This book is positioned both within the short-term changes deriving from the economic crisis in Europe and the longer-term changes associated with individualisation and exposure to risk in late modernity.

1.2 The contribution of social policy theory

There is no doubt that youth policy is of growing importance, but the application of the tools and concepts of social policy theory or policy studies to research on young people is curiously underdeveloped in the existing social policy literature. A coherent conceptual approach to youth policy is made all the more urgent because youth is a phase of the life-course that presents several challenges to the traditional paradigm of social policy. First, the phase of ‘youth’ challenges the assumption underpinning the traditional welfare state that there is an age-related division between dependent individuals and independent individuals, instead creating a complex period of semi-dependence or fluctuating dependency status (Coles, 1995). Second, while there has been a large body of literature on older people (Bovenberg et al., 2010; Walker and Naegele, 2009), and children and the family (Bradshaw, 2012; Kjorholt and Qvortrup, 2012; Saunders, 2009), less attention has been devoted to the specific social policy needs of young people. However, the period of youth, rather than a phase between two dominant stages of the life-course relevant for social policy – childhood and adulthood – is a vital life-course stage in its own right, and one that generates specific policy needs.

In addition, evidence suggests that youth has become a more discrete and protracted phase of the life-course owing to a number of contemporary challenges to the traditional life trajectory, such as delays in marriage and family formation and later labour market entry thanks to higher levels of youth unemployment and participation in higher education (Laaksonen, 2000; Vickerstaff, 2006; Walther, 2006). Finally, young people undergo transitions that are specific to their life-course stage, such as moving out of the family home, moving in and out of education and training, and entering the labour market for the first time. These transitions have become more fragmented owing to contemporary changes (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007), and are shaped by structural inequalities, as will be discussed in Chapter 2. The policy context is struggling to keep pace with the rapidly changing and increasingly differentiated needs associated with these important transitions.

Recent European initiatives (for example, the Youth Guarantee, 2013) suggest that greater attention is being placed on adapting policies to the new conditions and transitions facing young people. Simultaneously, students and analysts of social policy must also pay heed to the ways in which economic and social policies shape opportunity structures, and play a role in constructing the youth phase more broadly. For example, from October 2013, the UK introduced different rates of the National Minimum Wage for people of different ages (£6.31 per hour for adults aged 21 and over; a ‘development rate’ of £5.03 per hour for workers aged 18–20 years; a rate of £3.72 per hour for 16–17-year-olds; and an apprentice minimum wage rate of £2.68 per hour). This policy forms part of a wider institutionalised discourse across Europe that positions young people as ‘deficient’ (perceived and constructed as lacking in value and skills), creates a ‘second-class’ labour market for young people and has the potential to further entrench youth disadvantage and precariousness. It is possible to find a correspondence between the European discourse and the three new dominating policy paradigms in the European labour market that Knijn (2012) has identified: the social investment approach, the transitional labour market model and the individual life-course model, which ‘propose, respectively, investing in, facilitating, and individualising the new social risks of newcomers on the labour market’ (2012, p. 21, italics in the original).

By highlighting the assumptions underpinning the policy discourses, this book moves beyond the focus of European policymaking on ‘youth unemployment’ and on the ‘five million unemployed youth’ and provides a more holistic understanding of the various challenges faced by young people. In some respects, while the three policy paradigms identified by Knijn (2012) represent three distinctive policy frameworks, they all share a focus on labour market transitions, without addressing the whole set of challenges faced by young people in other policy areas. This book points out how solving the issues faced by young people in Europe requires a set of interventions that do not always involve employment policies. The transitions during this life-course stage produce needs that are associated with education, skills acquisition and entry into the labour market, the transition out of the family home and into alternative housing arrangements and the process of family formation. The needs arising from these life-course transitions therefore cross-cut a number of social policy areas, including education, training, housing, social security, family policies and also labour market policies.

In many respects the analysis of this new policy environment and the effects of risk on young people’s lives has been confined to the sociology of youth (or youth studies), while social policy theory has not contributed to this debate. This book has been constructed with the belief that an integrated approach unifying youth studies and social policy has the potential to clarify the nature of inequality affecting young people and the relevance of welfare structures in mitigating contemporary risks. This is likely to provide a much more holistic understanding of the different resources that young people have access to, and draw on (through the state, the family and the (labour) market), in managing new risks and the role for policy in meeting their needs.

1.3 The structure of the book

Stimulated by the stream organised at the European Network for Social Policy Analysis Conference 2012 ‘Young People and Social Policy in Europe: New Risks and Emerging Challenges’ and by the panel on ‘Young People and Social Policy in Europe’ at the 2013 inaugural Youth Studies Conference, this book draws together new studies by European scholars in the field of youth policy to identify new and shared risks confronting European youth during the global economic crisis. In order to explore differences and similarities in young people’s experiences of risk across Europe, and different types of policy responses, the book combines cross-national analyses with country-specific case studies from different welfare states. The cross-national studies explore differences in youth policies and welfare outcomes across different European welfare states. The case studies consider the nature of, or change within, specific social policy areas or whole welfare states in individual countries, including the ‘social, political, economic, cultural and ideological contexts which impinge on the shape and impact of particular social policies’ (Clasen, 2004, pp. 94–5). This allows us to explore both the qualitative and quantitative differences in youth policies and welfare outcomes across countries.

The book includes studies from a number of contrasting welfare regimes to explore the different effects that welfare regime structures can have on European young people’s exposure to risk and on patterns of youth transitions (Laaksonen, 2000; Walther, 2006). The use of ‘welfare regimes’ analysis, or attempts to develop typologies or systems of classification to summarise similarities and differences in the design of different welfare states, has been a common feature of comparative social policy research (Kennett, 2004). Most influential in this approach has been the work of Gosta Esping-Andersen (1990), who developed a typology of European welfare states built on two principles. First is decommodification, or the extent to which the state enables its citizens to ‘maintain a livelihood’ without relying on participation in the labour market. It does this through the provision of social rights that ensure an adequate standard of living. The second is ‘stratification’, or the extent to which a welfare state promotes a certain system of social relations, and the character of those relations (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Drawing on these principles, Esping-Andersen identified three idealtype ‘welfare regimes’: the liberal regime type, in Anglo-Saxon countries such as the United Kingdom, in which social provision is residualist in character – targeted to the needy and often modest in value; the corporatist (or conservative) regime type, found in countries such as France, Germany and Italy, where welfare benefits are strongly linked to occupational status, so that those in secure work are well protected and those in precarious work receive inadequate protection, underpinned by the strong reliance on the role of the family in supporting its members; and the social democratic regime type, typified by Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterised by universal services and welfare benefits and a commitment to full employment (Esping-Andersen, 1990).

Since the publication of Esping-Andersen’s typology, a number of scholars have identified welfare states that do not fit neatly into the proposed three regime types, and which can be considered another distinctive regime type. For example, some have identified a ‘Southern model’ typified by Spain, Italy and Greece (Ferrera, 1996), and a post-communist welfare regime, comprising two ‘sub-worlds’, a Baltic Cluster and an Eastern European Cluster (Castles and Obinger, 2008). Some scholars have challenged Esping-Andersen’s work (and indeed the wider welfare regime typology approach), arguing that in order to be ‘decommodified’, a person must first be a labour market participant, and the focus on decommodification is therefore built on the ideal of the ‘citizen worker’ to the exclusion of groups for whom commodification (or labour market entry) is a problem (such as women and young people) (O’Connor, 2004). These scholars argue that an emphasis on decommodification fails to recognise the important role of policy in facilitating labour market entry (O’Connor, 2004). In addition to this, as we argue in Chapter 2, there are a number of limitations in applying the welfare regime typology in a context where young people are ‘semi dependent’.

In developing a typology of welfare regimes to compare the contexts in which young people undergo transitions to adulthood, Walther (2006) includes in his analysis the role of welfare state policies relevant for young people, including education, training and support for labour market entry. He identifies four ‘transition regimes’: the universalistic transition regime, found in the Nordic countries such as Sweden and characterised by comprehensive schooling and ‘collective social responsibility’ for youth transitions, such as rights to state-funded social assistance to support periods in education; the liberal transition regime, found in the United Kingdom, characterised by an individualised approach to youth transitions, including activation policies focused on labour market entry rather than education and training, and a ‘deficit’ model of youth unemployment that treats it as an issue of individual pathology; the employment-centred transition regime found in continental countries such as Germany and France, characterised by stratified systems of schooling that place children in streams from an early age, and by the polarisation of the labour market between the secure ‘core’ with generous social security provisions and the periphery with access to low, residual benefits; and the sub-protective transition regime, found in the southern European countries such as Spain and Italy, characterised by informal or insecure work and limited social protection, which rely heavily on family support (Walther, 2006).

Since Walther’s (2006) welfare regime analysis of youth transitions, social policy theory has moved on, supplanting this more static welfare regime approach that emphasises government institutions with an approach that focuses on ‘welfare mixes’ (Powell and Barrientos, 2004), or the role that public and private providers of welfare play in supporting a country’s citizens. The analysis in this book builds on the important welfare regime analyses of youth transitions, by proposing an understanding of ‘welfare mixes’ to clarify the comparatively different contributions made by the state, the family and the labour market to young people’s welfare across countries.

In order to do so draws on studies from welfare states that are classified as belonging to different welfare state clusters, in order to draw out the broad assumptions that underpin welfare systems concerning young people. It begins, in Chapter 2, by drawing on an analysis of welfare mixes to understand the way that young people experience and manage contemporary risk during transitions to adulthood. While some youth scholars argue that uncertainty and flexibility create greater choices for young people (Arnett, 2006), and others suggest that the effects of risk are shaped by pervasive structural factors (Bynner, 2005), this chapter uses the notion of the welfare mix to provide a ‘middle-range’ tool; that is, a method of understanding the complex relationship between individual agency and social and institutional structures as young people navigate life-course transitions in contemporary Europe.

The book is then divided into two parts: Part I – ‘Precariousness, Social Exclusion and Youth Policy in Europe’ – is concerned with young people’s experiences of precariousness, social exclusion and disadvantage in Europe,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Andy Furlong
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Young People and Social Policy in Europe: Past and Present
• 2. Constructing a Theory of Youth and Social Policy
• Part I: Precarity, Social Exclusion and Youth Policy in Europe
• Part II: Changing Transitions, Welfare Sources and Social Policies
• Index