From Ideology to Policy: Nativism, Producerism, and Authoritarianism in the Welfare Politics of Lega and PiS

Southern Europe is frequently characterised as a region of resistance to change, yet the post-crisis decade has transformed it into a laboratory for a new, exclusionary mode of governance. This paper challenges the view of the region as a passive "laggard" by analysing how Italy's Lega has actively innovated the welfare state, repurposing social institutions to serve nativist ends. By comparing Italy with Poland (Law and Justice - PiS) using a most-different-systems design, this study isolates the specificities of the Southern European trajectory in the context of the "populist zeitgeist" (Mudde 2004). Drawing on the CARIN deservingness framework (van Oorschot 2000; 2006), the analysis operationalises how "welfare chauvinism" (Andersen & Bjørklund 1990) is translated from party manifestos into policy outputs. The findings reveal that both parties pursue a strategy of "bounded expansion"—extending coverage while tightening the moral and political criteria of inclusion. However, the mechanisms differ. While PiS in Eastern Europe relies on "moral inclusion" rooted in religious and familialist values (moral governance), the Italian case demonstrates a distinct territorially mediated form of exclusion, operationalised through security decrees and administrative friction (e.g., Decreto Sicurezza, Quota 100). Here, Lega actively re-codes solidarity by tying welfare rights strictly to citizenship and legality. This paper conceptualises this divergence as an emergent pattern of "illiberal welfare governance" (Abts et al. 2021), in which social protection is repurposed as a tool for boundary-making rather than for egalitarian redistribution. By linking these policy outputs to the survival strategies of mass populist parties (Albertazzi, Zulianello et al. 2025), the study argues that Southern Europe is generating distinct configurations of illiberal policy responses to the poly-crisis that demand comparative scrutiny.