How do welfare states deal with the period of the life course that is youth? In this article, we propose a two-dimension typology in order to account for cross-national variation in the access to financial independence of young people, that is, what we call ‘youth welfare citizenship’. The first dimension addresses the issue of welfare support, and distinguishes between a familialization perspective, according to which young people are seen as children, and an individualization perspective, in which they are considered as adults. The second dimension relates to the integration into the labour market, which can either provide skills for every young person in an encompassing strategy, or deliver such skills only to a specific part of the youth population in a more selective strategy. It leads to four regimes of youth welfare citizenship, which we identify in the article: the denied citizenship, the monitored citizenship, the second-class citizenship and the enabling citizenship.

The constant decline of political trust has been shown in political sociology. Young people in particular seem to display lower levels of political trust, which is a challenge for the sustainability of democracy. Still, these levels of political trust among youth differ greatly from one country to another. This article therefore seeks to answer the following question: How can we account for cross‐national diversity with regard to young people’s political trust? To answer this question, I performed multilevel analyses based on data from the European Social Survey. I show in the article that cross‐national diversity stems from the institutional arrangements that structure entry into adulthood, i.e., what I call ‘youth welfare citizenship regimes’: The more inclusive is the youth economic citizenship and the more individualised is their social citizenship, the higher is young people’s political trust – which could buffer the decline in political trust.

The massification of secondary schooling constitutes the key educational project of the first post-war period. However, the resulting educational structures differed in terms of streaming and standardization. Despite their historical opposition to such expansion, center-right parties contributed to shaping these reforms. They generally opposed standardization because their distributive strategy rested on support from elites and middle classes. However, their stance on streaming varied. Centre-right parties supported streaming when they were linked to teachers and private providers who opposed comprehensive reforms, but supported de-streaming where such groups aligned with the left. This article shows how center-right parties in Bavaria, France, and Italy, with common partisan distributive aims, introduced varied public service reforms following from their links to different vested producers. It argues that theorizing such reforms requires considering both distributive and productive environments.

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