The Uncertain Path Towards Social Investment in Post-Crisis Italy

There is a vast, well-informed, comparative literature concerning welfare reforms in the advanced Western economies in the post-industrial era (e.g., Hausermann, 2010; Bonoli and Natali, 2012; Bermendi et al., 2015). In Europe, reactions to the change of the economic, social, and demographic structures have been diverse. Accordingly, social policy reforms have taken different directions. While almost all the national governments have displayed limited room in which to maneuver to expand purely transfer-oriented consumption social policies (Hemerijck, 2012; 2015), a pure neo-liberal strategy based on cost containment and institutional retrenchment has not been the only, possible reform strategy (van Kersbergen et al., 2014). Indeed, in the last few decades, the literature has underlined the fact that social investment has increasingly represented a useful, new recipe for recalibrating the old welfare institutions in European countries. Social investment has been presented as an alternative solution both to retrenchment and to a pure transfer-oriented welfare state welfare state (Armingeon and Bonoli, 2006; Hemerijck, 2017). However, western European countries have implemented such policies to very different degrees and in some countries SI measures are still underdeveloped. Italy is one of these. Until the outbreak of the economic and financial crisis, Italian governments were quite skeptical towards re-orienting the scarce resources at their disposal towards social investment policies so as to update the fragmented Italian welfare system. However, in the last few years, social investment policies have found renewed interest from policymakers, at least on paper. Between the 2014 and 2018, the center-left governments run by the Democratic Party (PD) promoted a new wave of multi-dimensional welfare reforms, in which both consumption and social investment-oriented instruments were at stake. This article addresses the following questions: which specific trajectories were taken by these reforms? Did they imply an expansion of the social investment policies vis-a-vis the retrenchment of consumption policies or did they follow a different logic, and why? The goal of the research is therefore twofold. First, by relying on the theoretical framework provided by the recent literature on social investment (Garritzmann et al., 2019), it wants to provide a qualitative-oriented analysis of the reform trajectories in three specific areas: the labor market policy, the family policy and the educational policy. Second, it aims at unveiling the politics dynamic which brought the PD to propose those reforms. The assumption is that the specific trajectories of these reforms depended primarily by reconfiguration of the PD’s interests and values and on its realignment along the middle and upper-social classes. With this respect, I will show that such a realignment did not produce the same policy outcomes which are visible in other European countries. From a methodological point of view, the paper uses a qualitative-oriented policy analysis of the reforms, based mostly on both primary sources (legislative texts) combined with a quantitative-oriented analysis of the latest social survey datasets (ESS and INVEDUC).