The Territorial Reconfiguration of Active Welfare States

In most advanced industrial states central levels of government were exclusively responsible for the regulation of labor market policies (LMPs) and redistribution until recently. This started to change in the mid-1990s when many countries decentralized many social policy competencies. These spatial and governance reforms made evident a key paradox—how to have sufficient subnational flexibility to bring social policies closer to local circumstances, while also centrally regulating subnational systems to avoid disparities and fragmentation. This paper focuses on the territorial reconfiguration of LMPs in Italy, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. By summarizing the key findings of a bigger research project (see López-Santana 2015: SUNY Press), this piece shows that the reconfiguration of LMPs in the activation era should not be understood as zero-sum game in which one level of government gains all the powers and another one loses them; rather, states attempt to find their own balance between ‘unity and flexibility.’ In addition, by differentiating among administrative, political and fiscal reforms, the paper shows that the five countries have strengthened administrative flexibility over the management and delivery of activation measures. Yet, central levels have simultaneously used their political and fiscal powers to strengthen their powers in this policy area. This, in turn, has allowed states to gained flexibility in the provision of LMPs, while also pushing for national standardization. From a methodological perspective, this paper is grounded in rich data (i.e., more than seventy five semi-structured interviews), and fine-grained and systematic cross-national comparisons. In addition, it adopts a rare transatlantic and multilevel approach to the study of the welfare state reforms, especially in the activation era.