The rising invisible majority in need of new social rights

Emanuele Ferragina (1) , Alessandro Arrigoni (2)

1 OSC - Observatoire sociologique du changement (Sciences Po, CNRS)
2 University of Oxford

Only 15 years ago it would have been difficult to envisage the current European political landscape: the decline of mainstream political parties, the rise of new challengers on the right and left, the crisis of European Union institutions in the wake of austerity policies and centrifugal tendencies such as Brexit. The consequences of the 2008 financial crisis have strongly affected the continent and are often invoked to explain the challenges traversing Europe at the political and social levels. Despite the relevance of this crisis, however, one has also to examine the long-term challenges posed by the transformation of European societies. To do so, we have developed the notion of the ‘rising invisible majority’ to explore the interconnections between the political economy and the changing composition of society. This concept charts a similar—if differently paced—transformation across Europe throughout the neoliberal phase of capitalism. We suggest that this transformation can affect the political and social context.

Keywords: political economy; political participation; social exclusion; welfare state; poverty

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Sociology; Humanities and Social Sciences; Political science

Emanuele Ferragina, Alessandro Arrigoni. The rising invisible majority in need of new social rights. Matthew Donoghue; Mikko Kuisma. Whither social rights in (post-) brexit Europe?, Social Europe; Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, pp.51 - 59, 2020, 9783948314170. ⟨hal-03455789⟩