Societal Anxieties and Perceived Economic Vulnerability: How Social Pessimism Shapes Financial Insecurity Across Europe

Contemporary European societies face overlapping societal challenges—ecological degradation, immigration pressures, and widening economic inequality—which generate a pervasive climate of uncertainty affecting citizens’ perceptions of their own life conditions. This study investigates how social pessimism, conceptualised as a multidimensional orientation reflecting perceived threats across environmental, migratory, and distributive domains, relates to subjective financial insecurity at the individual level. Drawing on harmonised cross-national data from the CRONOS-II panel (N = 8993), covering eleven European countries, we construct a composite pessimism index and analyse its association with perceived financial strain using multivariate and multilevel regression models. Results demonstrate that individuals who express greater societal pessimism report significantly higher levels of financial insecurity, even after controlling for income, education, employment status, and country-level heterogeneity. This relationship is moderated by socioeconomic position; specifically, the pessimism–insecurity link is strongest among lower-income and less-educated groups, suggesting that material precarity and anticipatory anxiety compound one another. Cross-national analysis reveals substantial variation in effect magnitude, with the strongest associations observed in Hungary, Portugal, and the Czech Republic, and the weakest in Slovenia and Iceland. These findings contribute to the interdisciplinary understanding of how macro-level societal concerns permeate individual wellbeing, demonstrating that subjective economic vulnerability is shaped not only by objective circumstances but also by the broader socio-political climate in which citizens interpret their life situations. The results underscore the need for policies that address both material conditions and the affective dimensions of societal uncertainty in order to strengthen social cohesion and reduce perceived economic risk. Theoretically, we frame social pessimism as a formative composite capturing perceived threat to societal stability, offering an integrative perspective on how structurally distinct societal concerns converge to shape economic subjectivities.