Employment-related Social Citizenship and Its Resource-based Underpinnings: An Assessment of Country-year Data

This Working Paper explores social-rights realization in the realm of employment, empirically applying the resource-based framework of the EUSOCIALCIT research consortium.  It does so by analyzing quantitative, aggregate country-year information about national-level employment-related social rights resources, outputs and outcomes for EU member states and other industrialized democracies between 1960 and 2018.  Such analysis clarifies two fundamental aspects of social-rights realization. First, it systematically tracks developments in employment-related outcomes, outputs and macro-level proxies for resources – all germane to employment-related social rights at the national level.  Do we see deepening social citizenship in Europe by these measures? The answer is, broadly, “yes”: the data reveal substantial deepening of many measures of Europe’s labour-related resources, outputs and outcomes since the 1970s. Second, the Working Paper explores the hypothesized causal chains linking resources to outputs and to outcomes in the realization of social rights.  Using basic statistical regression techniques, the focus is on whether and how measures of social-rights resources are empirically associated with (subsequent) measures of outputs and outcomes.  Do resources foster the realization of social rights in practice measured in outputs and outcomes?  The answer again is ‘yes’.  There is a lot of variation with respect to which macro-level resource patterns matter for which measures of outputs and outcomes – reflecting the imperfections of the measures, not just the differences in substantive implications of resources. However, country-years marked by more substantial normative, instrumental and enforcement resources tend to develop more substantial social-rights outputs and outcomes.