This paper develops and examines a model of how welfare states affect employment insecurity. Based on data collected in 15 advanced industrial societies, the first stage of the analysis shows that people's evaluations of their current job security is significantly affected by employment situation, employability attributes, and the general state of the labor market. Moreover, we find that employment protection legislation slightly reduces people's estimates of whether they might lose their job. In a related analysis, we find that employability attributes significantly affect people's estimates of whether they would be able to find alternative employment. In a second stage of the analysis, we find that people's expression of worry about losing employment, which we term “employment insecurity,” is a function of the security of the current job, prospects for replacement employment, and levels of nonmarket support in the form of income pooling within households and welfare state spending. However, the results also show that, while social spending decreases employment insecurity, unemployment replacement wages have no systematic effect.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments: This research was in part supported by NSF grant SBR-9818525 to Chris Anderson. The survey data used in the study come from ICPSR Study No.3032. The original collector of the data, ICPSR, ZA and the relevant funding agency bear no responsibility for uses of this collection or for interpretations or inferences based upon such uses. The data were analyzed with the Limdep econometric software. We are grateful to Silvia Mendes for her help with the data.
Click here for the complete paper in PDF format.
Address all correspondence to :
Professor of Political Science, Center on Democratic Performance (CDP), Department of Political Science, Binghamton University, SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA. E-mail: cdp@binghamton.edu
Jonas Pontusson , Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4601, USA. Tel (607) 255-6764 ; E-mail: jgp2@cornell.edu .