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 vestige of the traditional welfare-state policies of industrial societies.In this paper we develop a formula for making the weight of the family in social security visible and comparing it through the evaluation of 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 there is considerable variation in the degree to which welfare institutions treat the social citizen as an individual and that the results do not correspond to common welfare categorisations.

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The characteristics of self‐employment in Europe have changed profoundly in the last decades. The share of solo self‐employment has grown and individuals combine more frequently dependent employment with self‐employment at the same time, or more often switch between dependent employment and self‐employment. These developments heavily affect the pensions of the self‐employed and therefore present a challenge for the old‐age security systems of European welfare states. So far, there has been little comparative research on how periods of self‐employment in the working career affect pension income in different European welfare states and how this is linked to the institutional design of pension systems. The paper contributes to filling this research gap by investigating the effect of self‐employment in the working career on individuals' pension income in 11 European countries. The findings show that self‐employment has a negative effect on total pensions of men and women. However, country differences are not significant in men, while in women only in the case of Poland and Belgium are there significant but contradictory effects of the share of self‐employment in the working career on total pensions. These effects are due to pension regulations concerning the contribution and benefit calculation rules for self‐employed persons.

European welfare states used to be based on the principle of the family. Since the s, however, 'individual responsibility' has been promoted, which fundamentally alters the traditional welfare-institutional framing of the family and the corresponding construction of the social citizen. One policy field that has been heavily influenced by this development is old-age security. The literature assumes a convergence towards institutional individualisation. We show this however to be incorrect. We empirically analyse and classify welfare-institutional change in old-age security with regard to individualisation. An innovative methodological approach for institutional analysis allows a nuanced identification of the welfare-institutional trends towards individualisation of the social citizen above pension age both within and between welfare states. We conclude that there has been no general and no partial convergence towards individualisation. Instead, on average, family elements in old-age security have either increased or persisted. Also, our analysis suggests that welfare-institutional change with regard to family is far from being a linear process and in part even displays contradictions.

Family is one of the major principles of welfare state redistribution. It has, however, rarely been at the centre of welfare state research. This contribution intends to help remedy the research gap in family-related redistribution. By examining the German welfare state which is known to be both redistributive and family-oriented, we want to answer the question of how and how far the German welfare state institutionalises family as a redistributive principle. Our case-study of German welfare state regulations in terms of family is based on the tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD and its Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT). We differentiate 54 family forms to adequately reflect our three theoretical assumptions, which are: (1) redistributive logics differ across family forms, and in part markedly; (2) these differences are not the result of one coherent set of regulations, but of an interplay of partially contradictory regulations; (3) family as a redistributive principle manifests itself not only in terms of additional benefits to families, but also in terms of particular obligations of families to financially support family members before they are entitled to public support. These aspects have hardly been analysed before and combining them allows a clear evaluation of family-related redistribution.