How individual- and national-level power resources shape social rights take-up, spending and outcomes

This chapter explores empirically the claim that social rights outcomes rest upon “power resources” available to citizens, using quantitative information at both the individual and national levels in the realms of worker unemployment and employment. The analyses unearth broad descriptive and inferential evidence that power resources facilitate social rights realization. Settings with more generous unemployment, childcare, and parental leave benefits tend to have slightly higher take-up rates than do settings with less generous benefits, and national-level instrumental and enforcement resources also tend to spur such take-up rates. These same national-level normative, instrumental, and enforcement resources are associated with higher employment rates and lower poverty rates. Also, normative, instrumental, and enforcement resources tend to increase the likelihood that unemployed individuals rely upon unemployment insurance transfers. Such patterns clarify the view that power resources are crucial to Europe's social rights realization that is central to the European Pillar of Social Rights.