Friday, April 15, 2016
Assembly G (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
There has been growing recognition that portability of social security rights is a central element of transnational welfare in the enlarged European Union, as it regulates the transfer of vested social security rights of mobile individuals. However, little is known about whether different regulations have systematic logics of inclusion or exclusion for particular migrant characteristics, nor how these vary across countries. This paper presents first findings from the NORFACE-funded research project TRANSWEL, which compares portability regimes of social security rights between the old and the new EU member states. The empirical policy analysis uses an iterative cross-national and transnational methodology to explore the regulatory conditions affecting portability of welfare between four pairs of European countries: Hungary–Austria, Bulgaria–Germany, Poland–United Kingdom and Estonia–Sweden. Developed from research conducted by 4 research teams, our empirical analysis of the portability regimes of social security rights exposes: 1) how different regulations are underpinned by systematic logics of inclusion or exclusion for particular migrant types, and how these vary by country and policy area and 2) how this selectivity is achieved across cases and policy areas. This paper concludes by exploring the implications of these regulatory conditions and their underpinning logics, for the production, reproduction and subversion of inequalities and exclusion.
