Abstract
The share of elderly in European populations has grown and these elderly are living healthier and longer lives. Policy makers in Europe have accordingly identified an increasing potential for this group to participate in different forms of paid and unpaid activities. In order to systematize European elderly’s productive activities, the article proceeds in two steps: First, it reviews previous research on country differences in European elderly’s participation in employment, informal care for elderly relatives and volunteering in clubs and associations. Based on data from the European Social Survey (ESS), in a second step we assess the analytical potential of different welfare state typologies, using linear regression models. Our analyses measure to what extent the typologies, which were developed for the general population, are suitable for explaining country differences in the elderly’s participation in paid and unpaid productive activities. We conclude that the north-south gradient, which we observe for all three types of productive ageing activities of elderly Europeans is mainly related to the role which welfare states attribute to the family. Welfare states with a high degree of de-familialisation fare best in encouraging their elderly men and women to participate in all types of paid and unpaid productive activities.
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Notes
European Social Survey Cumulative File, ESS 1–6 (2014). Data file edition 1.0
Paid work comprises employment, self-employment or working for a family business. It also includes respondents who are only temporarily not working.
We find no substantial difference in the outcome if we use data from wave 6 (2012). To make the results comparable to our analyses on informal caring, we based our analysis on the second ESS wave.
Moreover, Pfau-Effinger’s cultural approach would ideally be operationalized by using an indicator referring to people’s opinion on working women (or mothers). The ESS 2004 does not include indicators which capture whether people think that family is the “best” form of care and available items which touch upon the issue do not cover at all care for elderly people.
A detailed table on the classification can be found in the supplement Table 1. Added countries can be identified through italic script.
Haberkern et al. (2012) make the additional point that the share of irregular providers of care (once a month or less often) is much higher in Scandinavian countries while carers in Mediterranean countries tend to have the highest provision of time; in our own analysis with ESS data, we cannot replicate this finding.
Although we acknowledge the general issue of cultural comparability of survey questions in comparative studies, we believe that our operationalization of informal care by these two rather concrete questions does not leave too much space for cultural interpretation. Respondents do not have to name these activities “caring” which might indeed be a more sensitive cultural word.
An alternative dataset which contains information on employment, informal caregiving as well as volunteering is the European Quality of Living Survey (EQLS), a representative survey which is done every four years since 2003 by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions and which is used by the already mentioned AAI. Although it contains all European Union member states, it excludes countries, such as Norway and Switzerland in the most recent wave (2012). For the purpose of our paper, this causes problems in the second part of our empirical analysis where we test the explanatory power of different welfare state typologies: due to the country selection in the EQLS some classifications contain categories with only one country. Using ESS data with a different country selection ensures that each category contrains at least two countries.
While it is true that informal care can also be given to non-family members, such as neighbours, previous research shows that the largest share of informal care is given within the family, namely for partners and parents (in law) (Attias-Donfut et al. 2005). On the other hand, volunteering is usually defined by engagement outside the realm of the family (and other close social ties, such as neighbours). Although we acknowledge that the two dimensions of productive ageing are thus closely linked, we believe that it makes sense to differentiate between more family-related informal care and volunteering as an activitiy which is characterised by a person’s engagement outside the family.
An assumption reconciling the two positions states that the relation between state and private engagement is context-dependent, i.e. depends on the area of volunteering and the organisational context in which volunteering takes place. Thus, in liberal welfare states, the lack of social services is substituted to a large degree with voluntary engagement in church organisations (“service function”), while social democratic welfare states support especially the (active) membership in trade unions and political organisations (“expressive function”) (Janoski 1998; Salamon and Sokolowski 2003).
We acknoweldge that the ESS, like any other country comparative study is confronted with the challenge of different cultural interpretations of questions. Thus, in countries where helping neighbours is part of “normal” social behaviour, attributing those activities to volunteering may not occur. Since our analysis only deals with formal volunteering, i.e. in organisations, we believe however that the problem is much less of an issue.
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Acknowledgements
We kindly thank the participants of the doctoral colloquium in Empirical Social Research at the University of Konstanz, Germany, as well as participants of the RC 28 Summer Meeting 2016 in Bern, Switzerland, for valuable comments. Moreover, we thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. European Social Survey data were kindly provided by Norwegian Social Science Data Services.
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This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (grant no. STR 1322/2–1, AOBJ: 604,774).
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Strauss, S., Trommer, K. Productive Ageing Regimes in Europe: Welfare State Typologies Explaining Elderly Europeans’ Participation in Paid and Unpaid Work. Population Ageing 11, 311–328 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12062-017-9184-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12062-017-9184-4