The Right and Minimum income. Explaining Italian exceptionalism

Since the 1980s, politics matters has become a key hypothesis in welfare state research, widely applied by scholars to interpret overall welfare state arrangements and sectoral developments that occurred in core social policy areas, especially pensions and health care. Conversely, the political dimension of minimum income protection has received substantially less consideration. Narrow policy analyses and governance issues, either at the national level or in comparative perspective, have in fact largely prevailed with regard to this policy field, usually considered less contentious, due to a limited impact on overall welfare budgets, coupled with the scarce power resources and political mobilization of (would-be) beneficiaries of anti-poverty measures. In light of the “weak politics” of Minimum income schemes (MIS), the introduction of these programs has often been interpreted as the unquestioned result of policy learning and/or mimesis-diffusion processes. Against such backdrop, the paper aims at contributing to the politics of welfare literature providing evidence of the potentially contentious nature of anti-poverty policies. To this end, we consider the developments of MIS in Italy during the period 1996-2011, in an attempt to make sense of what can be termed a sort of Italian exceptionalism. Italy represents in fact an intriguing case-study from a comparative standpoint for two intertwined reasons. First, from a policy perspective, Italy is one of the last EU-28 member states still lacking a last-resort safety net for working-age individuals in the form a fully-fledged minimum income scheme. The Italian exception, however, is not the result of political and institutional inertia; quite the opposite, it is the outcome - despite high functional pressure - of a somewhat incoherent trajectory made of several attempts followed by policy reversal, at both the national and regional level. Second, from an interpretative standpoint, policy developments observed at the national and regional levels are rather puzzling in comparative perspective, thus calling for interpretation in causal terms. In contrast to what observed in other European countries, political dynamics came in fact to be salient in Italy not just regarding the introduction of a MIS, but also for its continuation or termination, and this holds true at both the national and regional level. Party politics therefore appears to have had a broader impact on the fortunes of MIS in Italy with respect to other EU peers, where the advent of center-right coalitions did not call into question the existence of such schemes, either in early-bird countries – i.e., the UK, Germany and Austria – or as in late-comer countries – i.e., Portugal and Poland. Questioning the expected classical left vs. right parties’ divide towards minimum income, the paper shows that the activation of additional lines of conflict - especially within the center-right camp – is key to make MIS a politically contentious issue, challenging its introduction/consolidation. Our empirical findings suggest that politics matters for MIS, yet political “contentiousness” is more likely to emerge in multi-party systems, that reflect complex underlying political cleavages.