Reporting on social exclusion: standard of living and social participation in Hungary, Spain, and Germany

The issue of social exclusion, currently of particular concern to policy makers in Brussels, is a manifestation of new aspects of social inequality that are supposed to go along with persistent high unemployment rates and increasing poverty affection. The concept provides a multidimensional and dynamic perspective of the resultant weakened possibilities to participate in social life. The growing acceptance of the term, however, has not been accompanied by a consensus regarding who exactly belong under its rubric nor how this could be verified empirically. This contribution makes an effort to cut down the broad meaning of social exclusion in order to propose dimensions and indicators for measurement and monitoring purposes. With the help of actual data from the Euromodule, a representative survey instrument for European welfare comparison, the interplay between standard of living and social participation is analysed in Hungary, Spain, and Germany. The three countries represent different European regions and varying types of welfare and social protection policies. Decisive factors influencing vulnerability to exclusion include relative perceptions of deprivation, the general level of welfare in a country as well as access to support from social networks.