ILPC 2026

The paper focuses on the concept of precarity, whose prevalence has massively proliferated the past years in academic and public policy debates. Yet, the term remains theoretically fragmented (Della Porta et al., 2015) and empirically under-investigated (e.g. Standing, 2011, 2014). Consistent with Puar (2012) and Nielsen and Rossiter (2015), the current paper argues that precarity is more than simply financial and contractual vulnerability that extant research tends to focus on (Rubery et al, 2018; Moore and Newsome, 2018) but is in fact a more complex notion, disseminated in individual’s lives, affecting and being affected by different factors (Greer et al, 2018). The paper contributes by offering a broader conceptualisation of precarity, suggesting a multi-dimensional perspective, theoretically informed and empirically tested. Drawing from the literature, we identify four different aspects that define precarity: the employment aspect, the household aspect, the political participation and the financial aspects, capturing not only elements related to quality and insecurity of people’s work lives, but further taking into consideration social, household and political factors, arguing that “varieties of precarity” in Europe go beyond employment (Alberti et al, 2018). Drawing on data from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) from 17 countries our analysis consists of three steps: First, we use factors analysis and create different factors that capture the four different aspects of precarity (employment, financial, household and political). In the following step and based on these four aspects, we conduct latent class analysis and create clusters, which identify homogeneous groups of individuals with similar characteristics by taking into account these four aspects of precarity. In the last step we “map” individuals within their countries, as well as examine their individual profiles in detail and specifically in relation to gender, age, contract types and employment status (employed, unemployed, self-employed).