Welfare institutions have long been set up in most European countries in ways oriented towards the family as the one basic principle. Reforms in recent times however have fundamentally changed the conception of the social citizen. Yet social rights are still mainly conceptualised in the literature in terms of employee rights, and family elements are often interpreted as a kind of vestige of the traditional welfare-state policies of industrial societies.

In this paper we develop a formula for making the weight of the family in social security visible and comparing it through the evaluation of cross-country levels of institutional individualisation. We deliver original theoretical, conceptual and empirical insights into the welfare-institutional order with the aim of furthering the understanding of the current social constitution of European societies. The findings show that there is considerable variation in the degree to which welfare institutions treat the social citizen as an individual and that the results do not correspond to common welfare categorisations.