The Political Economy of the School-to-Work Transition

The school-to-work transition is structured by policies, especially education policies and employment policies. Still, the literature either focuses on the latter or on the former. I propose here a new theoretical framework arguing that we can find two ways of structuring such transition by articulating these two institutional realms in Europe. I have called “youth economic citizenship” the specific institutional arrangements between those policies that one can find in a country. I argue that there are two kinds of youth economic citizenship: an “inclusive” strategy in macrocorporatist countries and a “selective” strategy in liberal countries. In the inclusive strategy, the education system reflects a “skills-for-all” approach. It provides skills for the majority of young people, limiting educational inequalities, and allowing them access employment rather smoothly. Employment policies are then supposed to offer a second chance to the low-skilled, in the form of youth guarantees for instance. On the contrary, with the selective strategy, the education system is elitist and follows a “skills-for-the-best” approach, leading to important education inequalities and many drop-outs. Employment policies reinforce this logic as they do not invest in human capital of the low-skilled but focus on providing them atypical low-skilled jobs. Empirically, I proceed in two steps. First, I identify the two strategies by analysing a range of policies and indicators, and by proceeding to cluster analyses. Second, after having elaborated an index of youth economic citizenship based on previous indicators, I test the importance of macrocorporatism as a central driver by running Qualitative Comparative Analyses.