Only the lonely : Om ensamhet i olika europeiska välfärdsregimer

Sammanfattning: This paper explores loneliness in different types of European welfare state regimes, and how it differs between different types of regimes. Loneliness is divided into objective and subjective to make it clear what is being looked at, and also the connection between the two has been considered. To approach this problem, countries have been chosen to represent liberal, corporatist, and social democratic welfare state regimes by the criteria that the respective characteristics are the most clear. The countries which have been analyzed are Sweden (social-democratic), Poland (corporatist) and Great Britain (liberal). In general, these countries correspond to the theoretical criteria as a whole, but to further the analysis specific policies of the welfare state has been broken down into four aspects; family, housing, unemployment and pension policy. The material is drawn from the European Social Survey and has then been recoded. To analyze this, cross tables has been made to see the spread of both kinds of loneliness, and a linear probability model has been done to look at the difference in the odds of feeling lonely or not between the countries. The results show that subjective loneliness is lower in Sweden, as well as most types of objective loneliness, except living alone. Between the different countries, there was a small difference in chance of feeling lonely even when the composition was taken into account. However, the links between objective and subjective loneliness was not deemed statistically significant when comparing the countries, except one of the types of loneliness. Living alone was shown to have an impact differing between the countries, placing Great Britain as the country with the highest probability of feeling alone whilst living alone, followed by Poland, when compared to Sweden.