The discovery of a Southern model
The idea of grouping Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece into a unique “Southern European welfare model” emerged in the 1990s, in the wake of three debates. The first revolved around Esping-Andersen’s typology of welfare regimes. This only included Italy, as a member of the conservative-corporatist regime, prompting an interest in bringing the other three countries into the typology as well. The second debate focused on the modernization process of the “new Southern Europe” after the advent of democracy. This debate provided many insights into the transition and invited a closer exploration of the features and role of social policies. The third debate, driven by the European Commission after Maastricht Treaty, focused on socio-economic diversity and convergence within the EU. The analysis of a new dataset of quantitative and qualitative data revealed the distinctiveness of the Southern European cluster, alongside other regional models.
Drawing on these three debates, my 1996 article highlighted a number of shared features of the “Southern model”:
- A fragmented and internally polarised income maintenance system: generous benefits, especially in pensions, for certain groups (e.g., civil servants, employees of core economic sectors) and weak support for others (e.g., self-employed, irregular workers, informal economy workers).
- The absence of a basic safety net, in particular a national minimum income scheme for individuals and families with insufficient resources.
- Universalistic health care systems. Despite occupational fragmentation in income maintenance, the four countries had introduced national health services with open and free access for all citizens, thus treating health care as a basic citizen’s right.
- A low degree of stateness, i.e. the vulnerability of welfare institutions to partisan pressures, often clientelist practices.
In that article, I argued that these four elements constituted a rather coherent syndrome. Adopting a developmental perspective, I identified a number of factors as plausible determinants: a belated and incomplete formation of a modern economy (weak Fordism); strong familialism, supported by a powerful Church and its “social subsidiarity” norms; a legacy of ideological polarization; widespread patronage-based party competition in a context of soft stateness, especially in backward areas.
A particular role was played by the internal division of the left. In health care, the shared determination to promote universal coverage resulted in the establishment of national health services, seen as victories over conservative-corporatist interests. However, in the area of transfer benefits, particularly pensions, divisions between communists vs. socialists, maximalist vs. reformist trade unions led to a dualist policy: fighting for improved benefits for core industrial workers while accepting weaker, sometimes particularistic, support for marginal workers. These dynamics contributed to the internal imbalances of social insurance systems.
The Southern European syndrome had important distributional implications. Old age was generally more protected than the other risks of the life cycle. Moreover, within each risk, a wide gap of protection existed between insiders and outsiders. This “double distortion” (functional and distributive) had visible re-stratification effects, filtered by age, gender, employment sector, and area of residence.
Reform and recalibration: a substantive balance sheet
This pictured witnessed a significant transformation in the subsequent fifteen years. A gradual recalibration affected both the structure of social spending and the institutional design of social protection, reducing fragmentation and enhancing polices for social inclusion. The EU played an important role in promoting change and convergence towards EU standards. At the same time, the internal variation of the region – already visible in the early 1990s between Spain and Portugal, on one hand, and Italy and Greece on the other – witnessed a further increase. The Southern model evolved, without, however, suppressing the basic affinity between the four countries.
The Eurocrisis provoked a noticeable reversal of these trends. The divergence between Southern Europe and the EU core countries has increased again. Retrenchment measures in the Iberian countries (minimum income, child benefits, health) aligned them back with Italy and Greece. Since the mid-2010s, with the economic recovery, social expenditure resumed growth, especially in domains traditionally neglected – the fight against poverty, family benefits, and unemployment protection. Again, the Iberian countries showed more dynamism than Italy and Greece as regards the front of social investments.
The Next Generation EU provided funds and other incentives for a new round of recalibration, this time from cash transfers to social services. A look at Eurostat data indicates a noticeable smoothing of the functional and distributive distortions. Especially in Spain and Portugal, gender imbalances have decreased, particularly in terms of employment levels. However, the transition to the service economy has not overcome labour market segmentation. The expansion of employment policies and unemployment benefits has not reached out to the new categories of outsiders, in particular, young precarious workers and Neets.
Since the 1990s, there has also been a clear “hardening” of the state and its administrative apparatus. We now have at our disposal large comparative datasets on party patronage, clientelism, and linkages between parties and voters. Two indications emerge: South European political systems still display more negative indicators than Continental and Northern countries; such indicators have registered, however, significant improvements since the early 1990s.
Europeanisation has prompted, in turn, a significant strengthening of the institutional capacities of the state, thus foreclosing the margins for partisan patronage. The traditional juxtaposition between a maximalist, strongly anti-capitalist and anti-Western left, on one hand, and a reformist, social democratic left has abated. Welfare universalism has become a shared objective, which the radical left associates with issues of democratic renewal and broad economic reform. A divided left still remains a common feature of the Southern European countries. At the same time, especially in Italy, a new right has also emerged, characterized by strong anti-immigration and Eurosceptic positions, on the one hand, and a combative stance for preserving the benefits of insiders, on the other hand.
The polycrisis has led to an increase in the “hybridization” of traditional region-specific welfare models throughout Europe. The jury is still out, however, for determining whether it is time to bid farewell to the Southern model as an analytical category, or it is still useful to retain it in order to detect persisting (if disguised) intra-regional affinities or novel ones.
The Southern model and comparative analysis: a theoretical balance sheet
When originally outlined, the idea of a distinctive Southern model received many constructive comments and some criticism. In the second half of the 1990s, Esping Andersen’s three worlds were at their height in terms of academic attention. The addition of a fourth regime was considered as a marginal, if not misleading, diversion in respect of the mainstream classification. Yet my goal had not been to challenge the famous trilogy in its analytical structure. On the contrary, I wanted to suggest a potentially fruitful extension to some internal variations of de-commodification/destratification (e.g. the protection differentials across risks and social groups), to the properties of the welfare administration in addition to benefit formulas (e.g., the degree of stateness) or to the provision of health care – in important domain of decommodification /destratification not considered by the original operationalisation of a welfare regime.
The characterization of the Southern model has gained increasing traction in comparative debates throughout the years, inspiring new research not only within the Southern European region, but also in other contexts. It is a pity that the “welfare modelling” literature has not captured the heuristic breadth of my characterization. The “Mediterranean” type is still considered a “conservative”, patronage-based type of welfare states, at an early stage of development.
The term “model” was chosen in analogy with the Scandinavian debate, but was somewhat misleading. What I had in mind was, in fact, the notion coined by Francis Castles in 1993, that of “families of nations” characterized by deep affinities: cultural and institutional attributes (ideas, practices, legal principles, policies) linked to geographical proximity and a common past, such as the Nordic countries. Rather than fully fledged affinity à la Castles, Southern Europe displayed, in my view, similarities or resemblances – a likeness which was elusive but stood out almost intuitively when observing the countries located in this area. In epistemological debates, family resemblance is something more than just a superficial similarity among disjointed phenomena. It is the expression of an underlying configuration or an ordering principle that is shared by the cases.
Family resemblances are the raw material of a well-known analytical procedure in the social sciences: the construction of ideal types. The latter are formed through the extraction of attributes from different historical cases that resemble each other under a certain perspective (not only the “welfareness” of Southern European states, but also their stateness when providing welfare). Types (and more generally, analytical categories) are epistemic constructions linked to specific research interests. They are realistic constructions, rooted in an ontologically autonomous social world. But they are not mere mirror images of that world, according to a correspondence model of truth. It is the researcher who chooses the resemblances on which to focus, seeing them through the lenses of a set of cultural meanings and values.
A checklist of observed similarities across countries is not enough to make them worthy of comparative analysis. For the latter, it must be plausibly argued that those resemblances make up a coherent set which can be reconnected to a distinctive antecedent background. Moreover, it must be assumed (and then shown) that such a set makes a difference for people’s life chances and/or in conflict dynamics and institutional transformation. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe that the argument made in the 1990s in support of a distinctive Southern European type of welfare state did unveil interesting and previously unnoticed family resemblances with theory-relevant systemic effects across the four nations, reflecting similar developmental trajectories and generating similar distributional outcomes.
The widespread reference that the notion of a “Southern European model” has had in inspiring welfare state research also outside the European context is perhaps the most telling indicator of this notion’s scientific fruitfulness. The high fragmentation and internal polarisation of income maintenance (often coupled with universal health coverage, as in Brazil or South Korea), the absence or weakness of the safety net, and the clientelist manipulation of benefits are common features of social protection in various countries of the developing world. In identifying an accounting for such features, scholars are profiting from the fertile strand of research on the Southern model, which is now reaching its thirtieth birthday.
Which research agenda for the future
Given the undeniable fact of recalibration (functional and distributive), can we now consider as “exhausted” the heuristic value of the Southern “model” concept as regards the four countries for which this concept was originally elaborated? Have the welfare states of this area “normalised”, overcoming their historical developmental delays and shortcomings? Have they become part and parcel of an internally differentiated, but ultimately unitarian “family” of nations, each characterised by local combinations of a common pool of family resemblances?
We can tentatively suggest the following answer. First, during the last three decades a process of “convergence” has taken place among European welfare states around a set of social policy goals and instruments now formally acknowledged, monitored and supported by the EU. The European Pillar of Social Rights and the Social Convergence Framework are the emblematic symbols, output and point of reference for this transformation. We can still observe cross-national variations, but above a common qualitative and quantitative threshold, as it were. In this sense, the heuristic value of traditional typologies – and the analytical criteria on which they were based – has clearly diminished. A “Martian tourist” visiting Europe would be likely to come across very similar social policies for the same risk domains in each of the visited countries, whether Spain, Belgium or Finland.
Second, all welfare states are now faced with similar or even common challenges, increasingly filtered by the EU (green and digital transitions, systemic competition with other regions of the world, economic and financial shocks, and other catastrophic risks, etc.). On this front, again above the common threshold, we may hypothesize that developmental legacies still play a role as additional liabilities or assets. In Southern Europe, high public debt or pronounced demographic aging (two developmental legacies, precisely) clearly constitute a liability, while the strength of family solidarities (persisting even after the gender revolution) may constitute an asset in coping with sudden shocks at the macro, meso, and micro levels. Even low stateness may have left behind a positive legacy in terms of local networks, social capital, and resource mobilization strategies in support of economic development (as argued by the literature on “virtuous clientelism”).
If this is true, then the research agenda about the Southern model is far from exhausted. This agenda is not limited to retrospective accounts of recalibration/normalisation. It should also include an analysis of the persisting constraints and, especially, the emerging opportunities stemming from developmental trajectories and legacies. This new part of the agenda could unveil interesting and counterintuitive positive dynamics left over, but some of the old features. It could also promote a renewal of the analytical toolkit and, last but not least, provide precious insights for policymaking, at the national, EU, and even global levels.