How do European welfare states deal with the new period of the life course that is youth? I propose a two-dimensional typology to account for cross-national variation in youth access to financial independence, or what I call ‘youth welfare citizenship’. The first “social citizenship” dimension addresses the issue of welfare support, whereas the second “economic citizenship” dimension relates to the school-to-work transition. This leads to four regimes of youth welfare citizenship: denied citizenship (France), monitored citizenship (Germany), second-class citizenship (UK), and enabling citizenship (Sweden).
