This blog post is based on an article published in the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy by Damien Pennetreau, Claire Dupuy, and Virginie Van Ingelgom.
European welfare states have changed significantly over the last few decades. Governments have shifted away from simply compensating people after periods of hardship. They have increasingly asked for reciprocity through controls and sanctions, often referred to as activation. More recently, they have also tried to prepare people for career breaks and non-linear careers. Training, guidance, upskilling and employability support have become central to what is often called the social investment turn in social policy. The idea is appealing: rather than simply repairing damage after job loss, social investment policies are meant to help people build the capacities they need to navigate an uncertain labour market.
Social investment as a moral project
Social policies also convey normative messages about what welfare is and what it should do. In other words, they convey representations of what is and what ought to be: what the problem is, how target groups and beneficiaries should behave and what kinds of solutions should be adopted to achieve that desired state. The question then is, even if scholars and, to a lesser extent, policymakers have embraced social investment, have citizens done the same? Do social investment policies actually reshape how citizens think about solidarity?
This is the question at the centre of our recent article on active labour market policies (ALMPs) in France and Belgium. These policies are a useful case because they bring together several different visions of welfare. They include a protective dimension, through unemployment benefits and income maintenance (compensatory rationale); a disciplinary dimension, through monitoring, behavioural requirements and sanctions (activation rationale); and, increasingly, an enabling dimension, through training, counselling and other tools designed to improve employability (social investment rationale).
In theory, that third dimension matters enormously. Social investment is not just a technical policy reform. It carries a different moral logic. Instead of seeing solidarity mainly as compensation for misfortune, it suggests that solidarity should also mean helping people move forward, build capabilities and manage life-course transitions more securely. Some scholars describe this as “stepping-stone solidarity”: a type of support that does not only protect, but also enables.
Has the social investment turn reached citizens?
Our article asks whether this normative policy shift towards social investment is visible from the citizen’s point of view. Our answer is largely no. Citizens mainly perceive the compensatory rationale and some degree of activation. The social investment rationale is largely absent. More importantly, the coexistence of these different policy rationales creates an ideological dilemma: competing policy logics generate tension between the moral norms of compensation and reciprocity.
To explore that question and reach these findings, we conducted a comparative qualitative secondary analysis of focus-group discussions held in France and Francophone Belgium in 2006 and 2019. Importantly, participants were not prompted to discuss active labour market policy or to define social solidarity. They talked in their own terms, and we examined what happened when employment policy entered the conversation. That matters because it gives us access not to official policy language, but to citizens’ own words and reasoning when they make sense of welfare, unemployment and work.
Protection and reciprocity still dominate
We found that, across countries, time points and social groups, people did discuss solidarity. But they rarely did so in the language of empowerment or capability-building. Instead, discussions were dominated by two older and more familiar ways of thinking: protection and individual responsibility.
On the one hand, over time, country and socio-economic background, participants repeatedly treated welfare as a matter of rights, safeguards and minimum protection. They spoke about unemployment support as a baseline guarantee that prevents people from falling through the cracks. In this sense, solidarity still appeared as something society owes its members when they face insecurity.
On the other hand, these same participants often qualified solidarity with an equally strong insistence on effort, reciprocity and deservingness. Help was widely endorsed — but often on the condition that recipients were trying hard enough, behaving correctly or showing willingness to work. In that sense, support was not imagined as unconditional membership to a shared community, but as something that had to be morally earned.
This does not mean that training or guidance never appeared in the data. They did. Participants occasionally referred to retraining, counselling, support or the need to stay employable. But these were relatively rare and often discussed in practical, individualised terms — as tools someone might use — rather than as part of a broader moral vision of what solidarity should mean.
This asymmetry matters. If social investment was reshaping citizen-level norms in a deep way, we would expect people to talk more spontaneously about opportunity-building, capability development and future-oriented support, even among those who have not directly experienced such policies. We do not really see that. What we see instead is a more durable and ambivalent understanding of solidarity. We interpret this as an ideological dilemma between compensation and reciprocity.
That dilemma runs through several different ways of discussing employment policy. Sometimes people frame the issue through insecurity, stressing that labour markets expose everyone to instability and that policy should provide protection. Sometimes they frame it through social rights, asking what workers and jobseekers are entitled to. Sometimes they turn to individual responsibility, arguing that people must make the right choices and efforts. At other times, they use a market frame, focusing on incentives, labour costs and job creation. And occasionally they discuss solidarity directly, affirming it as an important social principle while immediately worrying about its limits, costs or possible abuses.
What is particularly interesting is that these frames do not cancel one another out. They coexist. The same person can defend solidarity and express suspicion toward benefit recipients. The same discussion can condemn insecurity and still justify stricter behavioural control. In other words, citizens are not simply “for” or “against” welfare. They are navigating a set of competing understandings that contemporary labour market policies themselves help to produce.
Why normative feedback matters
This is an important lesson for social policy debates today. Scholars and policymakers cannot assume that adding enabling instruments to activation policy will automatically generate public support for a more enabling understanding of solidarity. Policy design matters, but so does what citizens actually perceive. If sanctions, controls and obligations are more visible than guidance and support, then the moral and normative messages conveyed by policy may remain overwhelmingly shaped by discipline rather than empowerment.
The broader implication is not that social investment is irrelevant. It is that its normative promise is fragile. If governments want citizens to see solidarity as something more than either compensation or suspicion toward claimants, enabling policies must be not only present on paper, but visible, credible and meaningful in everyday experience. And they must be paired with real security, not merely with stronger expectations of self-responsibility.
In that regard, the stigmatising public discourses used to justify recent reforms to unemployment schemes in both France (2024) and Belgium (2025) are particularly revealing. They emphasised budgetary necessity and alleged misuse of the system, rather than the need to equip people to navigate an increasingly fragmented (and digitalised) employment landscape. Without speculating on these governments’ real intentions, one thing is certain: It is not likely that policies based on different rationales and mainly justified by budgetary constraints will be understood by citizens as policies meant to help them navigate an increasingly fragmented (and digitalised) employment landscape. At a time when labour markets are becoming more uncertain, that is no small issue. The politics of solidarity depends not only on how and how much states spend, but also on the moral messages policies send and the way they are publicly justified.
Reference
Pennetreau, Damien, Claire Dupuy, and Virginie Van Ingelgom. 2026. “Normative Feedback of Hybrid ALMPs: Citizen-Level Norms of Social Solidarity in France and Belgium.” Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy: 1–17. doi: 10.1017/ics.2026.10092.
About the Authors
Damien Pennetreau is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the TRANSITIONS Institute, University of Namur, Belgium.
Claire Dupuy is Professor of Comparative Politics, UCLouvain, Belgium.
Virginie Van Ingelgom is Professor of Political Science, UCLouvain, Belgium.
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