The Italian Welfare State after 20 Years of Institutional Change

Abstract

This essay attempts to reconstruct the way in which the Italian WelfareState has changed over time. In the last two decades the transformations in socialpolicies have radically reshaped the pension system, labour market policies, education,health and social care. The four main results of the research are: the specificity of theItalian situation is that, in comparison with many other Western European welfare states,the last two decades have witnessed reforms which have had a mainly retrenchmentimpact on the overall functioning of the WS; this has been the outcome of cuts intraditional policy fields, unmatched by any real «recalibration»; there is a continuitybetween the reforms made before and during the crisis; territorial differences in thefunctioning of the WS have increased over time and increasingly the Italian WS canbe seen today as «two worlds», with Southern and Northern models rather than asan integral single institutional feature; among other factors, politics can be seen asone of the main variables explaining the Italian WS trajectory.