How the on-going global economic crisis is reconfiguring the welfare state and its distributive dynamics across the population is a major issue for social policy analysis, whether it triggers, preserves or even exacerbates the boundaries between different categories of welfare “clients”. In this paper the main distributive outcomes of the current crisis are explored to understand if different patterns of welfare retrenchment can be observed in different welfare models. A main question of the paper is whether fiscal constraints in new EU member states (i.e. post-communist countries) exert the same kind of pressure observed in Mediterranean countries (the so-called PIGS group), which are generally exposed to the crisis in a much more dramatic way. The findings of the study reveal that a new configuration of welfare ‘rights’ in terms of access to welfare programmes is in progress both in the Southern and in the post-communist model. Nevertheless, it is at domestic level that the different impact of the global crisis is to be looked for. Divergent pathways are visible even within the group of Central Eastern countries, where the reaction of governments to fiscal constraints ranges widely in terms of distributive dynamics across different social groups. In the domain of social inclusion policy making (most notably unemployment benefits and minimum income schemes) welfare retrenchment is even more evident: a reconfiguration of rights and obligations of the prospective recipient population is urging a new debate on the existence of alleged welfare “scroungers” and in the emergence of new boundaries between deserving and undeserving categories of applicants. In some countries, for example stricter workfare mechanisms (e.g. those regulating “compulsory” community work for jobless people) are marking a new generation of social inclusion policies, more and more characterised by the idea that able-bodied persons should not receive social compensation.
