Measuring social citizenship in social policy outputs, resources and outcomes across EU member states from 1985 to the present

Social rights are essential for fully realising European Union (EU) citizenship and reaching the EU’s targets in reducing poverty and social exclusion. This paper lays the empirical groundwork to investigate the development of European social citizenship from 1985 to the present. It does so by drawing on a newly-compiled database, the Comparative Social Citizenship Dataset (CSCD), that brings together existing country-year macro data on policies, regulations, laws, social, economic and political conditions relevant to social rights. This dataset’s key measures concern three categories central to the EUSOCIALCIT’s resource-based conception of social rights: (1) policy outputs, including spending and policy-effort measures of policies seeking to foster social rights; (2) outcomes, societal conditions like poverty and inequality relevant to the societal value-added of social rights; and 3) resources on which citizens and policymakers draw that drive and give policy force to social rights. Based on analyses of the CSCD macro-level measures of such conditions, the paper develops two sets of insights into a resource-based conception of social rights in Europe.