The ambiguity of activation policies: How activation policies challenge gendered patterns of social citizenship

Social security has, since the writings of T.H. Marshall, been considered as a necessary precondition for the citizens’ social and political participation in the Western democracies. Social rights in this perspective complete the set of civil and political rights and constitute the core of what we call ‚social citizenship’. Of course, the access to full social citizenship in a given country has always been shaped in different ways for persons with different social roles and obligations, capacities and needs like e.g. men or women, migrants or natives, young or elderly and so on. Far from being universal and comprehensive, social rights may contribute to diminish inequalities but they also produce social structures in a society within a given national political context. The 'activation turn' in social policy since the mid‐90s, has brought crucial change to the systems of social security provision in most Western European countries as it emphasizes paid employment as major access condition to social security for all citizens. This change goes beyond what scholars can grasp in terms of allocation and re‐distribution; it is resulting in a re‐definition of the role of citizens in our societies, including the modes of state intervention. Analysing change through the lense of 'social citizenship' can make the scope and depth of this change visible. We need, however a more precise definition of what social citizenship might mean. Based on earlier concepts and integrating the feminist critique our paper aims at clarifying the concept of social citizenship, showing how it can be applied in empirical analysis of social policy change. We suggest using the term social citizenship regime which embraces both, aspects of substance as well as governance and we argue that both have to do with the citizen’s autonomy. As we will argue in the second section, the concept of autonomy offers a more complex and comprehensive horizon for assessing social policy outcomes, and therefore escapes the limited logic of economic utilization of a person’s capacities: Beside the citizens’ capacities and competencies, it addresses their relatedness and reflects individual, societal and political implications. And, unlike other concepts, the concept of autonomy is highly gender sensitive. In the third section we demonstrate how changes can be empirically assessed; here we derive three policy criteria from our analytical framework, namely the quality of social policy programs, the mechanisms of access and the degree of participation or commitment these programs allow for. The extract of seven country case studies (D, NL, UK, DK, N, IT, ES) allows to identify and illustrate institutional mechanisms which shape and change patterns of social citizenship for women and men respectively (section 3). On behalf of this roughly sketched illustration of national activation strategies we provide evidence that patterns of social citizenship at present undergo fundamental change in the sense that social inequalities are not attenuated but rather reinforced in many cases. This illustration