Scar effects of unemployment on generalised social trust: The joint impact of individual and contextual unemployment across Europe

Azzollini, Leo

doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102787

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 87 publications

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“…To prevent bias stemming from the fact that respondents from different countries differ in regard to their reliance on welfare benefits, I included a welfare dependency dummy that took the value one if, according to the respondents’ self-reports, the main source of household income came from welfare benefits. I further employed controls for labour force status at the time of interview, unemployment experiences (Azzollini, 2023; Laurence, 2015; Mewes et al, 2021), self-rated health (Glanville et al, 2013), income (Brandt et al, 2015), biological sex (Mewes, 2014) and immigration background (Dinesen, 2013). Household size was included as a crude proxy for embeddedness in trust-building networks of social connections to familiar people (Freitag and Traunmüller, 2009; Glanville et al, 2013).…”

Section: Data Measurement and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Welfare-state selectivity, universality, and social trust in Europe, 2002–2019: Bringing deservingness back in

Mewes

2023

Journal of European Social Policy

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Social trust is a moral resource with a normatively highly desirable pay-off. Previous research argues that universal welfare state programmes ‘make’ social trust whereas means-testing programmes ‘break’ it. Despite its important implications for welfare-state design, comparative longitudinal evidence for this hypothesis is scarce. To test whether within-country changes in social trust are associated with within-country changes in total, means-tested, and non-means tested social protection expenditure, I thus merge country-year specific ESSPROS welfare spending data with cross-country survey data from 30 countries that participated in the 2002–2019 European Social Survey. Results from multilevel regression models show that neither within-country changes in total nor means-tested or non-means tested social protection expenditure predict social trust. Based on insights from the welfare deservingness literature, the second part of my analysis concentrates on welfare spending directed at two different life-course risks, with sickness representing a risk that the public widely considers to be ‘deserving’ of welfare support, and unemployment acting as an ‘undeserving’ risk. I find that, within countries over time, means-tested healthcare expenditures predict decreases in social trust, whereas non-means tested healthcare expenditure is associated with increasing social trust. My results thus lend support for the hypothesis that welfare-state selectivity and universality can contribute to the making and breaking of social trust, but only when interventions target life-course risks that the public considers ‘deserving’ of welfare state support.

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Section: Data Measurement and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Welfare-state selectivity, universality, and social trust in Europe, 2002–2019: Bringing deservingness back in

Mewes

2023

Journal of European Social Policy

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“…This is due to its capital deepening and labor-saving impacts, which cause people's jobs to be substituted and income to decline [ [25] , [26] , [27] ]. Moreover, workers who experience job loss are not only directly impacted economically but also face a reduction in their social capital, stemming from their inability to engage in resource-sharing and social interactions in the workplace [ 28 ]. In addition, automation also has a mismatch effect on the labor market.…”

Section: Literature Review and Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of workplace automation on energy poverty: The new challenge of achieving SDG 7 in the context of technological revolution

Niu,

Li,

et al. 2024

Heliyon

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“…Therefore, external efficacy may link unemployment scarring to abstention by shifting economic preferences leftwards beyond the short‐term, which may not be sufficiently represented by a large political force. Furthermore, sociological research highlights how job loss is akin to a breach of a social contract (Laurence, 2015), fostering distrust in both society (Azzollini, 2023; Mewes et al., 2021) and politics (Giustozzi & Gangl, 2021), heightening the likelihood of abstention.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years, this research programme has focused on socio-political outcomes: past unemployment experiences depress social trust (Azzollini, 2023;Laurence, 2015;Mewes et al, 2021) and participation (Eckhard, 2020;Pohlan, 2019), shift those who lost their jobs towards the left (Wiertz & Rodon, 2021), undermine political trust (Giustozzi & Gangl, 2021), and depress political engagement and participation (Azzollini, 2021;Emmenegger et al, 2017). Yet, the works by Emmenegger et al (2017) on Germany and by Österman and Brännlund (2023) on Sweden are, to the best of our knowledge, the only to study the joint impact of job loss and age on political engagement relying on panel datasets.…”

Section: Unemployment and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doubly disadvantaged: Unemployment, young age, and electoral participation in the United Kingdom

Azzollini

2023

British Journal of Sociology

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Previous studies examine how unemployment affects socio‐political behaviour, but this literature has scarcely focused on the role of the life‐course. Integrating the frameworks of unemployment scarring and political socialisation, we posit that unemployment experiences, or scars, undermine electoral participation, and that this is exacerbated at younger ages. We test these hypotheses relying on the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society datasets (1991–2020), employing panel data analysis approaches as Propensity Score Matching, Individual Fixed Effects, and Individual Fixed Effects with Individual Slopes. Results suggest that unemployment experiences depress electoral participation in the UK, with effect sizes around −5% of a Standard Deviation in turnout. However, this effect varies powerfully by age: the impact of unemployment on electoral participation is stronger at younger ages (−21% SD at age 20), and weaker to not significant after age 35. This is robust across the three main approaches and several robustness checks. Further analyses show that the first unemployment spell matters the most for electoral participation, and that for individuals under 35, there is a scar effect lasting up to 5 years after the first unemployment spell. The life‐course emerges as central to better understand the relationship between labour market hardships and socio‐political behaviour.

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Scar effects of unemployment on generalised social trust: The joint impact of individual and contextual unemployment across Europe

Cited by 12 publications

References 87 publications

Welfare-state selectivity, universality, and social trust in Europe, 2002–2019: Bringing deservingness back in

Welfare-state selectivity, universality, and social trust in Europe, 2002–2019: Bringing deservingness back in

Impacts of workplace automation on energy poverty: The new challenge of achieving SDG 7 in the context of technological revolution

Doubly disadvantaged: Unemployment, young age, and electoral participation in the United Kingdom

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