Solidarity Regimes and Individualization: Institutional Change In Social Security Schemes

Since the 1990s so-called mature and upcoming welfare states have undergone fundamental reforms. These reforms are related to social, demographic and cultural changes, and they are at the same time highly influenced by a currently leading political concept: i.e. that of the self-responsible social citizen. Concurrently, it is widely assumed that welfare institutions will align and finally lead to institutional convergence, in our case to institutions based on the concept of self-responsibility.

Concepts, however, find entrance into institutions in very different ways. Actors, for instance, interpret self-responsibility in terms of individualization on the one hand, or subsidiarity with corresponding family obligations on the other. And indeed, institutional differences are to be found both in international comparison and within single welfare states, and family elements cannot be interpreted as the remains of former family-based welfare models. Thereby, unexpected effects and unbalanced influence of concepts on single institutions can result in institutional contradictions which, again, might be contradictory for the social citizens and lead to new forms of social inequality. The degree of individualization of different social rights to social security has, however, not been systematically gathered, even though its social and economic importance is increasing.

The aim of this contribution is firstly to deliver an analytical tool to identify the degree of individualization in social security institutions. The institutional degree of individualization will be measured for old age schemes separately for the security levels of living standard and of poverty prevention since it is assumed that the institutions tend to contradict one another to some extent in this respect. The empirical analysis will focus on 4 European welfare states at three points in time. It will therefore, secondly, deliver original empirical results on instituted intergenerational dependencies and it will challenge the assumption of convergence of welfare institutions with regard to individualization.