The youth welfare regimes: how future citizenship is shaped by today’s political culture?

The development of youth policies in Europe can be traced back to the work of the European Commission on 'Youth for Europe' since 1986. The multilevel governance of the EU and the open method of coordination at the horizontal level have framed national government policies that address youth needs in different sectors of the welfare state. Despite those political and institutional actions on national welfare policy agendas the position of youth remains fragile across several important policy domains (Chevalier & Loncle 2021). The measure of the 'relative elderly power' confirms the stability of electoral power of the elderly and pensioners in many European countries. In 1990s the Central- Eastern European countries politically prioritized youth that has led to policy refoms favouring the young generation, such as education and employment. Almost three decades later the measure of the 'relative elderly power' confirms the dominant electoral power of the elderly and pensioners in the CEE, with rather clear pro-elderly policy orientation in other mature welfare states. (Vanhuysse & Perek-Białas 2021) The question remains open - to what extent future citizenship of youth is shaped by today’s pro-elderly political culture? The fragility of youth leads to the postponement of full social, political, and economic autonomy, or to the ‘yo-yo’ transition between childhood and adulthood. (Walther 2006) The cross-national variations of youth in transition to adulthood can be partly explained by the youth transition regimes or the youth welfare citizenship regimes (Pohl, Walther 2007; Walther 2008; Chevalier 2016) implicating the concept of (de)commodification and (de)familialization. From this viewpoint, welfare states diverge in terms of the extent to which there is independence from the market and family. (Esping-Andersen 1990) Even though this is a useful analytical framework for acknowledging school-to-work transition, none of approaches observe the youth transition from the social investment (SI) perspective and is hardly dealing with complementarity of policies. (rf. Hemerijck 2015; 2018) In this respect, paper is aimed to adress youth welfare regimes over the life course transitions by focusing on recognized SI functions in such areas as social protection and incomes, education, and employment (Hemerijck 2015; 2018; Garitzmann et al. 2022; Kvist 2017; ) and less addressed but very important– housing, health and social services. The comparative study of the EU-27 countries (the most similar design with different outcomes) aims to understand the variance of youth welfare regimes across the dimensions of youth-orientated SI policy. First, the paper contributes to existing knowledge of the youth citizenship regimes and transition regimes. Second, it provides a substantial knowledge to set of policies and institutional environments shaped by today’s political culture on European and national levels.