Political interest of citizens usually is depicted as an individual attribute that can be explained by referring to the resources and skills of the people concerned. The analyses presented here are based on a critical assessment of the explanatory power of these approaches in cross-national and...

During the early post-war period, Western trade union movements grew in membership and achieved an institutionalized role in industrial relations and politics. However, during the last decades, many trade unions have seen their membership decline as they came increasingly under pressures due to...

The paper focuses on the circumstances that explain lone mothers' dynamics of poverty in five different European settings (Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Sweden) using household panel data. My aim is to tackle the problem of poverty comparatively, dynamically, and with a gender...

This paper attempts to assess the labour market integration of ex-Yugoslav immigrants in two European countries - Austria and Sweden - in terms of the relevant structural characteristics of the two societies, i.e. immigration and citizenship policies, labour market structure and welfare regimes,...

Self-employment still forms an important element in the social structure of modern societies. However, the group of the self-employed has experienced an enormous economic and social change. After a long term decline until the beginning of the 1970s in almost all industrialised countries,...

In comparative family policy research there has been a growing need for comparative data and information on family policies in individual countries. Existing data sources are not sufficient, because they are too highly aggregated and do not focus on the family in specific terms. This has been...

Social services are a relatively new field of comparative welfare state research. Though comparative studies on the whole area of social services are still rare, good studies and data are available on services for elderly people and children. In almost all European countries services for the...

The paper compares young adults' position in the '90s in three European welfare states: Finland, Sweden and Germany. Finland and Sweden, which represent the Nordic welfare state model, experienced deep recession at the beginning of the decade. This caused high youth unemployment and low labour...

Recent research on self-employment has emphasised the specific dynamic of the rise of female entrepreneurship. But self-employment is still predominated by men. Only about 25-30% of the self-employed are women and the female self-employment rate is often only half as high as the male...