Addressing social risks of older people with care needs: how European welfare states combine pension and long-term care policies

Abstract Older people with long-term care (LTC) needs represent a growing and vulnerable group in European societies. A focus on the interrelation between pension and LTC policies can be useful in determining the extent to which European welfare states address this group’s social risks. This paper asks how European welfare states differ in the extent to which their institutional constellations of pension and LTC policies address older people’s social risks. We systematically measure the generosity of both policy fields at the institutional level to investigate cross-national differences in five European countries representing different welfare regime types. Furthermore, we develop a typology with four types of institutional constellations: residual, pension-oriented supplementary, LTC-oriented supplementary, and complementary. Our empirical results show that the studied welfare states differ in their pension and LTC policy constellations, which has different consequences for the coverage of older people’s social risks.