Social Cohesion and the Labour Market: Societal Regimes of Civic Attitudes and Labour Market Regimes

The aim of this paper is to test the connections between the indicators used in the literature on social cohesion, which usually
reflect ‘general’ values or behaviours, and indicators specific to a particular space, namely the labour market. A key question
is the stability of the social cohesion’s indicators when moving from a societal level to the labour market. Based on data
from the World Value Survey, and following a restrictive definition of social cohesion, a comparison is done, for European
countries. Examination of the situation in the two spheres makes it possible to identify more or less homogeneous groups of
countries and also to point to instabilities. ‘Regimes’ of social cohesion begin to emerge. As in most analyses, the Nordic
countries (excluding Finland) have high scores in all the dimensions. Conversely, most of the new EU member states from the
former Eastern bloc have low scores, particularly in the horizontal dimension of trust between individuals.