Austerity and Welfare Reform in South-Western Europe: A Farewell to Corporatism in Italy, Spain and Portugal?

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the current economic and financial crisis on the consistency of the corporatist dynamic that has oriented governments, trade unions and employers' associations towards consensus in Spain, Italy and Portugal over the past two decades. Following the analytical framework developed by Öbert et al. (2011), which interprets corporatism as a process of political dialogue, we analyse whether the conditions that make exchange possible have been altered during the crisis and, ask, if this is the case, whether such a transformation is cyclical or structural in nature. New limitations on the autonomy of national governments with regard to the design of socio-economic policies have arisen. These are related to the supervision of national politics by supranational institutions, the introduction of which has profoundly altered some of the basic requirements for corporatist political dialogue: the mandate or sovereignty in decision-making and the value of the assets available for exchange between stakeholders.