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Recent research has established that employment risk shapes social policy preferences. However, risk is oftentimes conceptualized as an alternative measure of the socio-economic status. [The authors] show that employment risk and socio-economic status are distinct, cross-cutting determinants of social policy preferences. More specifically, [the authors] analyze the policy preferences of high-skilled labor market outsiders as a cross-pressured group. [The authors] first establish that labor market vulnerability has spread well into the more highly educated segments of the population. [The authors] then show that the effect of labor market vulnerability on social policy preferences even increases with higher educational attainment.

[The authors] conclude that that labor market risk and educational status are not interchangeable and that the high skilled are particularly sensitive to the experience of labor market risk. Thereby, [the] findings point to a potential cross-class alliance between more highly and lower skilled vulnerable individuals in support of a redistributive and activating welfare state. Thus, they have far-reaching implications for [the] understanding of both the politicization of insider/outsider divides and the politics of welfare support.

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All post-industrial labor markets become increasingly segmented between insiders who are in standard employment, and outsiders who incur a greater risk of unemployment and/or atypical employment. In this paper, [the authors] analyze to what extent this segmentation translates into actual economic, social and political dualism. [The authors] argue that this translation depends on institutional welfare regimes. While some regimes countervail segmentation, thereby preventing actual dualism in outcomes, others perpetuate or even reinforce insider-outsider divides.

Empirically, [the authors] show that structural change towards post-industrial labor markets has produced similar, but not identical sets of insiders and outsiders across regimes. [The authors] then examine the distributional consequences of segmentation with regard to three sets of outcomes: (a) labor market dualism, i.e. gross earnings power as well as access to job mobility and training; (b) social protection dualism, i.e. the effect of taxes and transfers on net income differentials between insiders and outsiders, pension policy and labor market policy coverage; and (c) political integration dualism, i.e. the insider outsider gap in terms of trade union membership and political participation.

The [authors] demonstrate that the structural trend of labor market segmentation results in different patterns of dualization: continental and southern European regimes perpetuate and even reinforce the insider outsider divide with regard to all three dimensions of dualism. In liberal welfare regimes, outsiders face strong disadvantages in the labor market. However, the liberal welfare state contributes to narrowing the gap between insiders and outsiders in terms of net income. In the Nordic welfare regimes, labor market segmentation is also a reality. However, insiders and outsiders fare more equally with regard to job perspectives, income, welfare rights and political integration.

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