Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) by Luigi Burroni Emmanuele Pavolini & Marino Regini

Author:Luigi Burroni, Emmanuele Pavolini & Marino Regini
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501761072
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Southern European Welfare Systems in Transition

ANA M. GUILLÉN, MATTEO JESSOULA, MANOS MATSAGANIS, RUI BRANCO, AND EMMANUELE PAVOLINI

6.1. Introduction

The idea that a distinct Southern European (SE) welfare model exists within European social protection systems was developed in the 1990s. Ferrera’s (1996) seminal article argued that SE countries shared several common traits with respect to both their welfare state architectures and welfare regime configurations. As for the welfare state, the first common trait relates to an institutional structure that has been evolving from a typical Bismarckian occupational approach to a mixed model with the development of Beveridgean universalistic health care systems (or, at least, moving toward universalism) since the 1980s—this coming with an increased role of general revenues in welfare state financing. The second common trait has to do with a highly fragmented1 corporatist income maintenance system, displaying marked internal polarization along the distributional (i.e., across social groups) and functional (i.e., across welfare sectors) dimensions. Peaks of generosity in the fields of pensions and unemployment protection for core occupational groups actually coexisted with large protection gaps, especially visible in the field of antipoverty and family policies, where underdeveloped social services and the lack of a minimum income safety net were southern trademarks. In other words, these countries presented functional and distributional imbalances in their welfare state architectures, where the prominent role played by cash benefits configured an extreme version of the transfer-centered social protection model typical of continental Europe.

The lack of a national minimum income scheme, the rudimentary character of antipoverty measures for working-age individuals, and the scarcity of social services—for both children and frail elderlies—made reliance on households as welfare providers’ key to maintaining social cohesion. Saraceno (1994) called such welfare regime “familialistic by default” in order to emphasize the lack of alternatives to the provision of care by the family—or, better, by women in a strongly gender-biased society and labor market where the division of labor followed the traditional male breadwinner model (with the exception of the Portuguese case). By contrast, reliance on the market had remained limited until the 1990s apart from the health care sector, which already presented elements of a public-private mix.

Several authors have argued that the four unbalanced (and underdeveloped, especially Greece and Portugal) SE welfare states have been facing critical modernization challenges since the 1990s. Actually, these countries needed to launch a thorough process of “institutional adjustment” (Flora 1986) of their welfare architectures in light of the changing “imperatives” of an increasingly globalized economy, population aging, and, last but not least, women’s emancipation and entrance into the labor market. All this was at a time when the convergence toward a single European currency and the reduced rate of economic growth typical of postindustrial economies greatly constrained the available resources for welfare state expansion (Ferrera 1996; Fargion 2000). To what extent, then, have the four SE countries been successful in this process of adapting their welfare institutions—vis-à-vis structural transformations—that would imply some kind of welfare “recalibration” (Ferrera, Rhodes, and Hemerijck 2000) along both the functional

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