Social (de)stratification in Europe: An empirical analysis of 22 welfare systems

Abstract

EU national governments and the EU itself are committed to improving the ef-fectiveness of social protection systems to promote the spread of ‘horizontal' relationships between individuals and remove inequalities that prevent people from fully participating in political, economic, and social life. We evaluate this process by examining the performance of social protection systems in 22 Euro-pean countries, focusing on the phenomenon of social stratification over the pe-riod 2007-2017. For this purpose, we refer to both a multidimensional perfor-mance index and principal component analysis. The empirical evidence suggests that the financial crisis of 2007 and the Great Recession that started after 2011 changed (in many ways downsized) the objectives of social protection systems, contributing only partially to the de-stratification of the population of European states over the period covered.