What Sustains Commitments to Safety Nets for the Poor? The Cases of Portugal and Spain

Social safety nets, such as minimum income schemes (MIS), are widespread policies across European welfare states aimed at fighting poverty and social exclusion. Yet, policies targeting the poor are politically fragile. On the one hand, they struggle to create constituencies, as people experiencing poverty are a socially heterogeneous group with few resources, hindering political mobilisation and representation. On the other hand, targeted policies break coalitions for redistribution and risk stigmatising recipients, rendering them less deserving in the public’s eye. Likewise, rights-based social policies tend to be vulnerable in comparison to contribution-based benefits, which enjoy greater legitimacy. This is especially pronounced in contribution-based welfare states, such as those in Southern Europe, where social insurance has traditionally crowded out non-contributory benefits. How, then, did Portugal and Spain – historically two welfare state laggards - manage to introduce minimum income schemes (MIS) in the 1990s and sustain them to this day? I argue that processes of ideational change among policy elites were necessary to the institutionalisation of minimum income schemes, enabling long-term political commitment to social assistance. However, ideational change alone does not explain policy introduction nor divergent policy reform trajectories between the two cases. Through thematic and content analysis of interviews, policy documents, and media articles, I process-trace the introduction and evolution of MIS in Portugal and Spain and show how elite understandings of poverty and social assistance have kept MIS in place. In addition, I identify key differences in institutional arrangements, timing, and actor constellations that allowed policy introduction and shaped divergent reform trajectories, leading Spain to reform and expand its social safety nets, while Portugal shows signs of policy drift. Despite both welfare states performing comparatively worse than their Western European counterparts in fighting poverty and social exclusion, the introduction and long-term political sustainability of minimum schemes constitute a significant legacy-breaking policy outcome. By moving beyond party politics and combining different institutionalist explanations for such outcome, the paper contributes to the literature on the politics of minimum income and anti-poverty policies by highlighting the role of different explanatory factors, such as multilevel governance, trade unions, and economic contexts, in shaping the political success of social safety nets in apparently challenging contexts.