In this issue of European Societies there are articles about the themes of family and social policies across Europe, relative risks of social exclusion and gender and occupational segregation. Finally, we have a contribution about European food policies. The papers compare social problems on the one hand and policy responses to them on the other, in comparative perspective. In this way we can see how different problems play out across Europe, depending upon the demographic and employment structures. We can also see the effects of policies in different contexts – however, given the complexity of issues involved, there is not necessarily a good or a bad solution across the board.
Mary Daly considers the different patterns of family relationships across Europe, the risks involved with commitment to parenting and the burdens of caring and the policy responses in different contexts. Linda Hantrais takes up a similar theme on the topic of European social policies for family and welfare, but looks at a range of recent research projects sponsored by the European Union and the extent to which they can be used to understand the different contexts of family and welfare. She considers methodological problems of how to combine qualitative and quantitative sources in doing this kind of research. Both papers consider the EU as well as the national level of policy making.
Chris Whelan and Bertrand Maître look at a different source of comparison using quantitative data: they consider the relative risks of social exclusion. They find that in all countries in Europe there is a vulnerable and a non-vulnerable group in terms of risk of poverty, although these differences are mitigated most in the Nordic universalistic welfare states. This leads them to consider which policies could best be used to tackle the problem of vulnerability to social exclusion.
Emer Smyth turns to another source of inequality in Europe, that of gender segregation. She finds that countries where gender segregation in the school system is high, are also associated with high levels of gender segregation in the early entry into the labour market. Despite the fact that young women attain better educational results in most countries, they still do not reach the same occupational levels as young men. Smyth's work indicates that we should look at the patterns of entry into the labour market and the relationship with the educational systems in order to better understand why this takes place.
One such segregated country is that of Estonia, where labour market entrants and their chances of getting jobs are strongly stratified by qualifications. Ellu Saar evaluates the relative risks of different routes into employment and the risk of unemployment by comparing Estonia to other European countries – the United Kingdom, Ireland and Portugal – which have similar systems of transition. With the final paper, that of Luigi Pellizzoni, we turn to a different theme. This author considers the trust, or rather the lack of trust, in food policies, which he attributes to the growing importance of uncertainty. He raises the issue of how public trust could be won back to legitimise this aspect of environmental policy.
Claire Wallace
Aberdeen, May 2005