Italian Welfare State Research Articles

The International Institute of the Middle Classes in the Early Twentieth Century: Economic Policies, Theoretical Models, and Action Plans

In the context of the recent debate on the role played by economists, international organisations, and epistemic communities in the development of new theoretical models and international economic policies, this paper aims to explore the contribution made by the International Institute of the Middle Classes. Such an organisation identified economic policy and analysis as the key to dealing with the social conflict that arose in Europe in the 1800s and 1900s. In addition to confirming the importance played by cooperation in the building of a new European order that could prevent social conflict, the exchange of ideas that occurred during the Congresses held by the Institute in different European cities in the early 1900s brought attention to the issue of social policies aimed at the middle classes. This would become crucial in the logic underlying the Italian welfare state, with the Bismarckian model providing the perfect liberal solution.

‘Bastion of Italian-ness’: the nationalization of welfare and the changing meaning of rehabilitation in post-war Italy (1945–59)

ABSTRACT The article analyses social welfare programmes set up by the Italian state to manage and provide assistance to refugees coming first from Dalmatia, then from Istria and finally by the territories near Trieste, between the immediate post-war period and the late 1950s. It connects the literature on these refugee flows and the historiography of the Italian welfare state by providing new insights into how the recognition of minority rights deeply affected the organization of the social welfare system throughout the 1940s and the 1950s. The article focuses on the shifting meaning of the term ‘rehabilitation’, an outcome of post-war transnational circulations of ideas about the renewal of welfare. It identifies three chronological sections: the aftermath of the war, when social assistance to refugees was organized in Italy in the context of a project to renew the state and its relations with the individual and society; the period after the signing of the Luxembourg Peace Treaty, when in response to the emergency but also out of purely political considerations public authorities significantly changed the guidelines of the entire social welfare system’s development; and finally, the policies set up in the 1950s, which aimed not only at providing stable accommodation for refugees but also at other geopolitical, socio-cultural, social engineering and electoral objectives. Thus, this contribution not only explains how the construction of the welfare state in Italy has been shaped by the problem of refugees, but also shows another side of the same issue: the role of welfare provision in constructing social groups, which in this case took on a strong ethnic and political character.

Childcare in Italy among migrants and natives: who uses which type and why?

The Italian welfare state is characterised by a preference for income transfers over transfers in kind and the marginal role of policies aimed directly at supporting the family. Despite the growing participation of women in the labour market, the Italian welfare system still assumes the family, with its unbalanced gender division of housework and its intergenerational solidarity, to be the primary provider of protection and support. As a result, in Italy in 2019 only 26.9% of children under 3 years of age were enrolled in formal childcare, which is below the European average. In this context, births from at least one foreign parent had increased over time, and foreign national children accounted for 14.0% of all children aged 0–3 in 2019. Despite this, migrants are still seen as ‘suppliers’ rather than citizens who, as parents, are potential consumers of childcare services. Aspects related to the use of childcare by migrants and differences compared to natives in Italy are currently understudied. We use the 2012 Birth Sample Survey by the Italian National Institute of Statistics to fill this gap. Mothers were interviewed about 18–21 months after having given birth: information on sociodemographic characteristics of both parents was collected, including their use of childcare services, their reasons for not using them, their unmet need for childcare services, and the lack of access to the job market due to care work. Our study aims to understand childcare patterns among migrants and the differences between them and those of the native-born population. We found that Italian mothers use informal care more than migrants. Unlike the evidence from other international studies, our results show that migrant mothers use daycare for children aged 0–3 more than native-born mothers. However, we found that the migrants who had arrived as children show patterns more similar to natives. This finding might be associated with a better knowledge of the system and a more extensive network (including grandparents) in Italy. Similarly, we found that migrant mothers who co-parent with an Italian father use more informal care and experience lower logistical barriers to accessing daycare. In addition, we observed that obstacles to children’s enrolment resulting in an unmet need for daycare are also related to migrant background.

2021: A year of transition for social security and welfare policies in Italy?

ABSTRACT The key question addressed by this article is whether the pandemic might represent one of those ‘critical conjunctures’ capable of altering the direction of development of the Italian welfare state. Having reviewed the main explanations found in the literature for the difficulties in modernizing the Italian welfare state, we provide an answer by analysing what happened in 2021 in three policy areas: that concerning families with children, and early childhood education and care (ECEC); that concerning the support of dependent old people, and that concerning minimum income policies, looking at the role played by party competition as well as by civil society. We find that while in the field of family policy and ECEC there has been a clear shift towards greater investment, in the area of care for dependent old people, developments have been more hesitant and more ambivalent. With regard to minimum income provision, political conflict has for the time being impeded any attempt at reform. The answer to the research question therefore is only partially positive

A public health Italian ethical movement to sustain the beveridge model: health promotion and equity

Abstract Worldwide sustainability of the National Health Systems (NHS) has been facing different challenges, such as population ageing, epidemiologic transition and deep social transformations. All these changes are struggling Italian welfare state and its public NHS. Following the principle of the Right to Health of the Declaration of Human Right and the Italian Constitution, a group of young health professionals from all over Italy founded a campaign called “2018 Primary Health care: Now or Never”(PHC Campaign) reminding WHO report of 2008 “primary Health Care: Now more than never”. This movement promotes a reform of the NHS focusing on comprehensive-PHC (C-PHC) and health promotion to guarantee sustainability of the Beveridge model italian system, fight health inequalities and answer the complexity of population needs in a period of spending cuts. Since the beginning, the movement started an educational program through the study of the literature and the research of the Italian and international best practices of C-PHC and community health promotion. As a result, to achieve the goal of this project, PHC campaign organized peer education training sessions, educational site-visit of some Italian best practices, lectures and workshops with Italian and foreigner health professionals experts on the field. Several national and regional events had been organized all over Italy. Members of “PHC” Campaign have been invited to write books, news on web-based newspapers on this topic and participate in congresses. To date, PHC campaign might be considered one of the strongest not-institutional voices in Italy in supporting the public beveridge-model NHS Moved from a strong ethical health policy view underlined the importance of the Right-to-Health and of a C-PHC based NHS, since the beginning, “2018 Primary Health care: Now or Never” Movement identified three asset of action: advocacy, education/knowledge and diffusion. Key messages The experience showed the importance of health professionals engagement in public health topics such as sustainability of public NHS in order to promote a reform towards health promotion and equity. PHC Campaign is an example of how a bottom-up ethical movement on public health from different Health professionals could actively contribute to promoting cultural and health policy change.

The distributive implications of welfare reform packages. The Italian case during and after the great crisis

ABSTRACT The paper analyses the pension reforms implemented during and after the Great Crisis in Italy (2011–2019), and evaluates whether a recalibration of the pension system and, more in general, of the Italian welfare state was involved. More specifically, through a multidimensional theoretical framework, the article assesses the distributive implications of the pension reforms not only within the pension realm but also by considering their interplay with those reforms that occurred in three specific sectors - namely, the labour market, the family, and anti-poverty policies. Pension reforms therefore are analysed in terms of welfare reform packages, where old and new policy instruments from different social policy fields are included. The work shows that recalibrating the Italian welfare state is still very difficult.

The factory and the welfare state: redundancy, benefits and workers’ organization at Alfa Romeo Arese, 1963-1986

ABSTRACTThe article tracks the relationship between the Italian welfare state and the social relations of production at a Fordist factory, showing how social policy influenced the pattern of workers’ contention on the industrial shop floor. Welfare state analysis has concentrated on the institutional aspect of social policy but neglected the role that state benefits played in industrial organization and workplace relations. The article ‘nests’ the analysis of social policy in a micro-history of the factory, using the case study of Arese – a plant owned by the carmaker Alfa Romeo – Milan, Italy. Tracking the history of Arese, the article shows how the Italian system of short-time work subsidies, the Cassa Integrazione Guadagni (CIG), served to quell industrial unrest and target unions’ organizational resources. From the late 1960s, the CIG was used by managers to suspend workers during strikes and acted as a deterrent against their mobilization. As redundancies increased during the 1980s, workers were put on short-time for prolonged periods and prevented from entering the factory. This degraded their professional identity and eroded their political ties with the workplace, curtailing the basis of unions’ organizational strength within the factory.

Welfare in the seventies: rise or fall?

ABSTRACTInterpretations of the seventies often rest on the category of crisis. Moreover, the topic of the welfare state has rarely been systematically addressed in historical studies of this decade. This article has three objectives. First, it seeks to place the historical evolution of the Italian welfare state within this double context in order to understand how analysing Italy’s welfare system can contribute to providing a more complete interpretation of this decade. The second objective is to verify to what extent is it true that, in quantitative terms, there was too great an increase in spending. The third objective is to assess whether and to what extent the external factors that led to the restructuring of European welfare systems also affected Italy.

When words matter: narratives and strategies in the Italian Jobs Act (2014–2016)

ABSTRACTWith the reforms of the so-called ‘Jobs Act’ (JA), Italy aimed to structurally reform its labour market and income-support system, through recalibration (i.e. a mix of both expansionary and retrenching measures) for old social policy risks, and some expansionary measures to face new social risks. The JA also became the symbol of opposite views about the Italian welfare state, being itself a reason for ideological conflict and coalition reshuffling in the Italian left. Ultimately, its increasing personalization around Renzi’s divisive figure detracted from its functional and substantive matter. Hence, the JA reform provides an unparalleled vantage point to investigate the role of narrative stories in shaping policy contents and reforms. The paper aims to contribute to the literature on social policy reforms by combining a focus on narrative stories with the analytical perspective of the Multiple Stream Framework. Through qualitative analysis of official documents, of more than 500 newspaper articles and of selected in-depth interviews to key informants, this paper reconstructs the narratives about the JA reform, considering both the supporters and the challengers. Building on the Multiple Stream Framework, the paper focuses in particular on whether and how policy entrepreneurs took advantage of windows of opportunity by shaping the narrative stories. Results are twofold. First, the paper shows the variations of social policy reform narratives across actors. Second, it demonstrates the crucial role of policy entrepreneurs in shaping narrative stories as a strategy to couple the streams of problem, policy and politics.

A burden to the welfare state? Expectations of non-EU migrants on welfare support

In recent decades European institutions have been promoting the broadening of immigrants’ social rights, while at national levels political battles have been led around the definition of the legitimate community of welfare receivers. Immigrants have been often depicted as undeserving individuals threatening welfare state sustainability, although existing research does not fully support this view. At the same time, political and academic debates on immigrants and welfare have diverted attention away from immigrants themselves, failing to address their experiences and welfare support expectations. This article aims to contribute to filling this gap by addressing to what extent non-European immigrants expect the Italian welfare state to provide support for their family. The empirical evidence builds on a survey administered, between 2014 and 2015, to about 350 immigrants from Maghreb, China and the Philippines residing in the Emilia-Romagna region. By means of a mixed-method comprising qualitative and quantitative analyses, the article shows that only a minority of respondents, particularly Maghrebis, have some expectations in terms of public welfare support. It suggests that such support is almost exclusively expected to cope with the needs of the young-family generation, while the needs of the elderly members are assumed to be met through relatives’ informal support. Moreover, the article highlights marked differences in expectations across specific groups and points to explicatory variables such as country of origin, gender, educational level, age on arrival and length of stay. It further reflects on immigrants’ degree of knowledge of the welfare state functioning and specifies the rationales, based on perceived rights or meritocratic criteria, explaining expectations for support.

The Italian Welfare State in the Crisis: Learning to Adjust?

After a decade of inertia, that left it unprepared to withstand the blow of the great recession, the Italian welfare state has witnessed significant changes since 2012. Externally driven consolidation in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis spurred yet another wave of social policy reforms after that of the 1990s. These reforms did not however invariably entail retrenchment. Both the Monti and the Renzi governments combined liberalisation with expansion of social rights, particularly in income support. As a result, the Italian welfare state looks more comprehensive than it was before the crisis. At the same time, there was no overall strategy of welfare modernisation based on coordinated social investment measures. The changes in Italian social policy since the outburst of the great recession highlight the importance of domestic politics interacting with external drivers of change. They also facilitate an assessment of the opportunity structures for further reforms in a political system that appears to be veering again towards consensus democracy.

Narrowing the gap: the middle class and the modernization of welfare in Italy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to offer a contribution to our understanding of the changing relations of the middle classes with the Italian welfare state. The paper argues that the new interplay between public and private welfare is based on a very simplified analysis of Italian society.Design/methodology/approachThe paper aims to integrate a variety of different theoretical approaches. The paper makes extensive use of the EU-SILC database, as well as the recently updated historic series of consumer studies undertaken by the Italian National Institute of Statistics. The data used in the paper were also drawn from the biennial cross-sectional Survey on Household Income and Wealth carried out by the Bank of Italy.FindingsThe analysis suggests that the problems of Italian society include not only a high incidence of poverty, but also increasing financial constraints for households placed between the established middle class and people in conditions of persistent poverty. The current public-private mix in service delivery appears less and less capable of protecting this social stratum against the growing risk of instability across all life domains, let alone of creating opportunities and fostering social mobility.Originality/valueThe paper explores some ways in which current politics of welfare have been designed with the view of fundamentally changing the welfare regime. It highlights how the public and private welfare mix has been purposefully organized in order to introduce a new model of social protection that aims to overcome certain specific characteristics of Southern European welfare states. It examines the sustainability of this model compared to the real living conditions of the Italian middle classes.

Italian Social Enterprises at the Crossroads: Their Role in the Evolution of the Welfare State

This paper investigates the relationship between the emergence of social enterprises (SEs) and the historical development of the Italian welfare state. Our research offers a comprehensive overview of the internal and external influences that shaped the constitutive relations between the welfare state and SEs. A qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups has been adopted. This study suggests that two interconnected dynamics—the emergence of new social needs being answered by private organisations and the increased prominence of third sector actors during the privatisation of the welfare state—shaped the co-evolution of the welfare state and SEs in Italy. The study also suggests that the emergence and evolution of Social Enterprises in the years leading up to 2001 was mainly a bottom-up phenomena stemming from the actions of citizens setting up private organisations (often cooperatives) to answer to social problems created by new social needs and the structural reform of the welfare state. After 2001 especially with the new law on SEs in 2016, the evolution of SEs seems to have been increasingly influenced by the surrounding ecosystem of actors and supranational policy discourses rather than SEs themselves.

The Italian welfare state in a supranational perspective: history and debates

The Italian welfare state in a supranational perspective: history and debates

Italian welfare as seen from the standpoint of the International Labour Organization (1944–68)

The evolution of Italian welfare cannot be properly understood unless it is viewed within a scenario that goes beyond the national one and accounts for both the different state experiences and geopolitical and supranational conditioning. By adopting a supranational standpoint, the aim of this article is to offer some new sources of reflection on the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in conditioning and assessing the Italian welfare model starting from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s. I intend to linger both on the ILO’s role in urging the development of modern social security systems and the adoption of certain welfare measures and on the representation and assessments carried out by the ILO regarding the actual development of the Italian welfare state.

‘These new rights’: social security in the postwar Italian debate

At the end of World War II the Italian welfare system, which had taken shape under Fascism, was in need of a radical overhaul. Nevertheless, the wait for organic, structural reform dragged on for over two decades without arriving, even in the Sixties, at an efficient framework for the welfare state capable of dismantling the corporatist, familist one inherited from Fascism. This article reconstructs the debates on social security and social rights after World War II. Beginning with the interest that was sparked, even in Italy, by the Beveridge Report, I will investigate the meaning given to the expressions “social security” and “social rights” by politicians and technocrats engaged in trying to reform the Italian Welfare State.

Is every country fit for social investment? Italy as an adverse case

The scientific debate on social investment (SI) is moving from an ideological and normative approach towards a more realistic one. Scholars are paying closer attention to the actual developments in social policy and to the contextual conditions and impacts of SI policies. Considering this, two main issues arise. First, that SI policies are politically feasible and likely to have positive impacts only if specific contextual conditions are met. Second, SI policies were supposed to have a positive impact on both inequalities and economic growth: a strong theoretical assumption that needs to be carefully tested. The Italian case will be used here to illustrate this new perspective and the consequences of the lack of contextual pre-conditions. For this reason, the article is divided into three parts. The first part will present our theoretical argument in the context of the most recent analytical accounts of SI policy in Europe. In particular we will argue that, given the lack of crucial structural pre-conditions, SI policies may have ambiguous and even unexpected negative impacts on both economic growth and equal opportunities. In the second and third parts, we will present empirical evidence of this ambiguity considering childcare and apprenticeship reforms in Italy. More specifically, based on empirical research carried out in Italy, we want to answer two questions: (1) Why is the Italian welfare state so ‘unfriendly’ to SI policies? What are the main factors explaining the limited room for SI policies? (2) When an SI approach is promoted in specific policy areas in Italy, what is its social and economic impact? Do these interventions achieve the positive results to be expected according to the SI approach? Finally, the last part synthesises the main arguments and aims to open a critical discussion on the structural pre-conditions of SI policies and the need for further analysis of the political economy contexts in which SI policy develops.

The Attlee government and welfare state reforms in post-war Italian Socialism (1945–51): Between universalism and class policies

The purpose of this article is to analyse how the Italian socialist movement viewed the social reforms of the Attlee Labour government introduced just after the Second World War. The intention is to study the extent and limits of the labour influence on Italian socialism. The Labour Party made the re-founding of a new interclass social pact, a universal matter intending to meet the needs of both the working and middle classes. The Italian socialist movement monitored the Labour government’s changes with interest, assessing them from two different perspectives. The reformist wing had a better grasp of the political–ideological implications of Labour’s approach to the welfare state. Vice versa, the majority of the Italian socialists pursued a class socialism and a strong alliance with the Communist Party, rejecting the Labour social policy model. After the split of 1947, however, the two views of Italian socialism failed to develop and implement a political programme for a welfare state based on the British universalistic tendency model. The political weaknesses of Italian socialist organizations in the field of social policy contributed to the characterization of the Italian welfare state in the post-war period and fundamentally delayed its universalistic implementation, at least until the 1960s.

Local history and history of the welfare state: the case study of Milan during the Cold War

This article explores the development of a municipal welfare state in post-war Milan. Looking at developments from a municipal level has interesting implications for the current historiography of the Italian welfare state which is less attentive to regional variations. The article shows how certain cities were able to develop local provision based on municipal rather than national strategies.

Social Innovation on the Rise: yet another buzzword in a time of austerity1?

We challenge the idea that social innovation can constitute an effective strategy to counter-balance the retrenchment of public social provisions. The changes within the Italian healthcare system, one of the most important sectors of the welfare state, in which the concept of social innovation been widely discussed, are a clear example of a broader trend toward decentralisation and marketization. In conjunction with a new balance between public and private funding, these changes are contributing to increased inequalities and territorial disparities. The call to social innovation have, is not embedded within a structural reform of the Italian welfare state and has the health care system, might simply become a convenient buzzword to forward neoliberal ideology in a time of austerity.