Navigating volatility in different welfare state contexts

Description du projet

L’interaction entre la volatilité, les politiques sociales et les stratégies des ménages

Le ciblage des revenus dans les politiques européennes de protection sociale vise à améliorer l’efficacité, mais des exemples concrets mettent en évidence ses limites. La recherche devrait se concentrer sur la manière dont les politiques interagissent avec les fluctuations des revenus des ménages et les stratégies d’adaptation. Le projet VOLARE, financé par le CER, entend clarifier la relation entre la fluctuation des revenus, les stratégies des ménages et la conception des politiques sociales dans différents contextes. Le cadre théorique suggère que les ménages utilisent des stratégies formelles et contraintes lorsqu’ils font face à la volatilité des revenus, en se concentrant sur la gestion à court terme ou sur les objectifs à long terme. Le projet évaluera cette relation à l’aide d’une approche mixte, en combinant des données sur les revenus mensuels de plus de 240 familles à revenus faibles ou moyens dans quatre pays européens. Les résultats devraient considérablement faire progresser la recherche sur la volatilité des revenus, la politique sociale et les stratégies des ménages.

Objectif

Income targeting has permeated social policy design in European welfare states, in order to boost their efficiency and effectiveness. Yet real-life examples of integrated income-targeted schemes highlight the shortcomings of an overly technocratic view. Social policy research needs to analyse how policy design interacts with the month-to-month income variability experienced by households, and the strategies they develop to cope with and navigate this volatility.

VOLARE disentangles the relationship between fluctuating incomes, household navigating strategies and social policy design in different institutional contexts. VOLARE’s theoretical framework argues that a) households employ both formal and constrained strategies in the face of volatile incomes, that can be focused on short-term juggling of incomes, or oriented towards longer-term objectives; b) the welfare state context and households’ preferences for stability influence the adopted strategies, but c) with their strategies households also actively navigate the eligibility and entitlement criteria determining the accessibility, timeliness and effectiveness of social policy responses. VOLARE assesses the implications of this interaction for effective social policy design.

The framework is scrutinized empirically within an innovative mixed-methods design that links consecutive quantitative monthly incomes collected among over 240 low to middle-income families in four European countries, with in-depth interviews on the strategies selected households develop to navigate volatile incomes. These findings are confronted with nationally representative month-to-month volatility estimates and welfare state responses. A survey experiment adds further substance as to how households value stability over income, given their access to formal or constrained navigating strategies.

In doing so, VOLARE forces a major breakthrough in the research on income volatility, social policy effectiveness and household strategies.