Measuring social citizenship: achievements and future challenges

Significant advances have been made in the development of measures of social citizenship, but this progress is not without its challenges and limitations. Drawing on new comparative analyses of two prominent datasets – the Comparative Welfare States Dataset (CWED) and Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP) – this study highlights several important inconsistencies found in existing data on social citizenship and identifies their underlying causes. This synthesis shows that much of the variation detected between corresponding CWED and SCIP measures stems from justifiable differences in basic operationalization, data selection, and measurement calculation. Based on our own pooled time-series analysis of the CWED and SCIP data, we find that some of the discrepancies between their measures have been overstated. Moving on to a broader perspective, we discuss the main advantages and shortcomings of each dataset and outline several directions for future data collection, with special attention paid to social services and new social risks. Keywords: Data collectiondata validitynew social riskssocial citizenshipsocial rightssocial services Notes Ferrarini et al. Citation(2013) claim that this approach is alien to the notion of social rights, but we find it in line with Marshall's (Citation1950: 11) broad definition of a social right as a ‘right to a modicum of economic welfare and security’. One example of the CWED data being taken and enhanced is the Unemployment Replacement Rates Dataset assembled by Olaf van Vliet and Koen Caminada (Citation2012). Van Vliet and Caminada constructed their dataset by first using the CWED data on unemployment insurance as a base and then adding observations for 16 new countries and 7 additional years. The 10 control variables are constitutional structure veto points, women's mobilization, per cent aged, voter turnout, strikes, authoritarian legacies, gross domestic product per capita, inflation, unemployment, military spending, capital flows, outward direct foreign investment, and trade openness. Detailed descriptions of the measures used for the independent variables can be found in Huber and Stephens Citation(2006) and Huo et al. Citation(2008). For a much more extensive treatment of these issues, see Stephens Citation(2010).