Varieties of youth welfare citizenship: Towards a two-dimension typology
Abstract
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.