Social exclusion, social citizenship and de‐commodification: An evaluation of the adequacy of support for the unemployed in the European Union

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Abstract
This article examines government support for the unemployed and their families in the European Union and attempts to demonstrate why the debate concerning the adequacy of unemployment benefit is based on a partial understanding of the income packages available to the unemployed. Conventional methods of assessing the standard of unemployment insurance have focused on the benefits available to a single head of household rather than the resources available to both the unemployed and their families. We argue that the manner in which unemployment benefit is supplemented by family allowances and housing benefit makes a significant difference to household income. Our results have important implications for our theoretical understanding of welfare state regimes, and, in particular the evaluation of the extent to which income‐maintenance systems free individuals from the need to participate in the labour market in order to be assured of economic security. We argue that the procedure adopted by Esping‐Andersen in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) to measure this process of de‐commodification does not take account of the experience of the unemployed and their families, and we use our results to construct a revised and expanded index of de‐commodification which provides us with a clearer impression of each country's characteristics.

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