How Do Ideological Alignments Shape Moral Elite Careers? Discourse Coalitions and Class Fractions’ Interests in Italian Welfare State Formation, 1898-1921

Welfare state scholarship has moved from structuralist accounts of the "logic of industrialism" toward analyses of working class and employers' mobilization or political elites' "growth strategies". However, while ideational approaches have examined policy paradigms and their underlying moral assumptions, less attention has been paid to interactions between economic elites and moral elites, i.e actors shaping societal norms - in this case - about legitimate form of state support. To explore patterns of interactions between those two elite types, this paper advances an analytical approach focused on discourse coalitions between moral elites and politically organized class fractions, asking: how strategic alignment of moral elites to a hegemonic discourse coalition affect their career outcomes? Inspired by the Gramscian concept of “historical bloc” as an alignment of material, organizational and ideational element, I use discourse coalitions to capture moral elites' alignment with economic interests through shared interpretive frameworks regarding the appropriate scope, purpose, and administration of social welfare The empirical analysis draws on position-taking and career data collected through the Moralites Project, systematically documenting Italian moral elites active in welfare debates between 1898 and 1921, a period encompassing both a paradigmatic shift from voluntary to mandatory social insurance and the crisis leading to fascism. Through Multiple Correspondence Analysis, four distinct clusters of moral elite position-takings emerges inductively that form discourse coalitions with class fractional interests expressed by economic organizations' position-takings. These coalitions supported competing welfare visions: anti-welfare economic liberalism; state-monopoly and market-based compulsory insurance; voluntary insurance schemes. Alignment patterns show deep divisions reinforced through transnational intellectual networks, but – taken diachronically – show an interesting level of resilience in face of the evolution of positions typical of time of hegemonic crisis. At T0 (1898-1915), no single coalition achieved dominance, but WWI fundamentally restructured the field leading to consequent recomposition. In the post-war period (T1: 1919-1921) dominant class fractions shifted from resistance to state intervention toward acceptance of a particularistic, mandatory insurance-based, occupation-centered model of social protection. Maintaining their discourse coalition affiliations, part of the moral elites shifted position correspondingly, to converge around the emergent hegemonic framework, bringing evidence to the Gramscian thesis of the class-allegiances of intellectuals. Following Poulantzas's analysis of Italian Fascism as compromise between class fractional interests, I use the regime transition as a quasi-experiment to assess discourse coalition affiliation's political consequences in the form of career outcomes. By projecting career quality data as supplementary variable onto the constructed moral space, I test whether specific articulations of welfare ideology -and their associated alignments between moral elites and class fractions -facilitated or hindered elite continuity across the regime change. Moral elites near to hegemonic class fractions experienced higher "survival" rates under fascism, indicating strong incentives to conform to dominant class interests. This study contributes to elite integration research by operationalizing and empirically testing ideological alignment as a coordination mechanism distinct from network ties and structural positions.