The highest pension expenditure in Europe, limited resources for families, children and the unemployed, virtually non-existent anti-poverty programs: after two decades of reform, both the «functional» - in favor of pensions - and the «distributive» distortion - in favour of the employed/ insiders - are still sensitive issues in the public debate on welfare reform in Italy.
The Italian syndrome constitute an interesting historical puzzle: when did the two distortions which characterize the peculiar welfare state «Italian style» emerge? And why? Which were the main drivers and dynamics?
By posing the analytical lenses on the roots of the welfare state «all'italiana», the volume has three main aims: i) determining the nature and the magnitude of the functional and distributive imbalances; ii) tracing the emergence of the two distortions over time and identifying the causal mechanism; iii) setting out explanatory hypotheses drawing from the comparative literature on welfare state development, ultimately providing a historical-institutionalist interpretation that can account for the choices made by Italian policymakers at the «critical junctures» when the double distortion emerged and consolidated.
The first part of the book provides the backdrop for the empirical analysis by presenting both the peculiarities of the Italian welfare state and the analytical framework. The second part and the third analyze policy developments in the 1950s and the 1960s respectively, the two decades considered the «turning point» for the Italian welfare state. Both sections focus on four policies: two hypertrophic sectors such as pensions and severance pay on the one hand; the two atrophic sectors of unemployment compensation and family benefits on the other.
The main argument of the volume is that the peculiar «Italian style» welfare state was the product of specific cognitive factors and especially the pattern of political competition during the «First Republic». Ideas as well as «polarized pluralism» and the «blocked democracy» of the 1950s-1960s were decisive in orienting the Italian welfare state towards the functional and the distributive imbalances.
