Back from the Cold? Progressive Politics and Social Policy Paradigms in Southern Europe after the Great Recession

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00323292241226806
• Author: Rui Branco,Joan Miró,Marcello Natili
• Date: 01 December 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Back from the Cold?

Progressive Politics and Social

Policy Paradigms in Southern

Europe after the

Great Recession

Rui Branco

FCSH/NOVA University

Joan Miró

Pompeu Fabra University

Marcello Natili

University of Milan

Abstract

This article examines the programmatic evolution of social democratic parties in Italy,

Portugal, and Spain, three countries in which the center-left has governed in the last

decade. To do so, the article develops an analytical framework for mapping social and

labor market policy reforms and assessing their liberalizing, regularizing, or recalibrat-

ing character. In explanatory terms, the article studies the coalitional politics behind

social democratic reforms as being conditional upon the relationships between orga-

nized interests, electoral social blocs, and party system dynamics. The comparative

analysis shows both commonalities and differences: the cases range from postindus-

trial recalibration (Italy) to inclusive egalitarianism (Spain), with Portugal taking a mid-

dling path, closer to that of Spain. Overall, in these countries a move away from both

traditional “social protectionism”and crisis-era internal devaluation has taken place,

but it has taken different forms depending on country-specif‌ic coalitional dynamics

within the left and trade union camps.

Keywords

social democracy, post-austerity, social policy, labor market reforms, southern Europe

Corresponding Author:

Joan Miró, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramon Trias i Fargas, 25-27, Off‌ice 24.236, 08005 Barcelona, Spain.

Email: joanmiroartigas@gmail.com

Article

Politics & Society

2024, Vol. 52(4) 630–661

© The Author(s) 2024

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00323292241226806

journals.sagepub.com/home/pas

Since the 1980s, the center-left has been depicted as being in dire straits many times,

seemingly forced into a defensive, crouching position. Such lows have been perceived,

and seized upon, as opportunities for renewal and reconstruction, from the Thatcher

years to the Great Recession.

1

One such moment of reconstruction linked to electoral

success was the Third Way/Die Neue Mitte politics of the 1990s,

2

a supply-side pro-

gressivist response to the ascendant neoliberalism, in the same way that the “social

investment”paradigm would later respond to the changing postindustrial economic

and social landscape of the knowledge economy.

3

In Europe, the austerity-oriented

management of the euro crisis deepened the sense of a crisis of social democracy,

4

with many authors arguing that the hard constraints of the ordoliberal-inspired

European Union’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) leave little space to

expand social protection, particularly in the debt-loaded southern European periphery.

5

For instance, a recent volume states that

Europe’s Center-Left has entered a stage of severe and secular crisis and it is not clear

how—or indeed even if!—it might manage to extract itself from its current malaise....

From Greece to Finland, from Portugal to Poland, Social Democrats are losing elections

and often dramatically so. . . . While there are counter-examples, even in those countries,

the Center-Left is grappling with a sense of purpose and direction.

6

In much of the literature, the diagnosis about the electoral and ideational crisis of

European social democracy has become a self-evident truth.

7

Surveying southern Europe since the Great Recession, we are left with some such

puzzling “counter-examples.”In Italy, between 2013 and 2018, the Council of

Ministers was led by three successive prime ministers from the PD (Partito

Democratico, or Democratic Party). The party was returned to government in 2019

with the Conte II Cabinet, as junior partner of the M5S (Movimento 5 Stelle, or

Five Star Movement), and joined the national unity Draghi government in 2021. In

Portugal, the PS (Partido Socialista, or Socialist Party) has governed from 2015 sup-

ported by a coalition of the radical left parties PCP (Partido Comunista Português,

or Portuguese Communist Party) and BE (Bloco de Esquerda, or Left Bloc), which

broke up in October 2021 and was replaced by a PS absolute majority government

from early 2022. In Spain, the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, or Spanish

Socialist Workers’Party) has governed since 2018, and since January 2020 has

been leading a coalition government with UP (Unidas Podemos, or United We Can),

a political force to its left.

8

This article investigates whether these experiences provide a counterpoint to the

conventional narrative of austerity as the only game in town in the European Union

or, conversely, reinforce it by offering yet other instances of the inability of center-left

governments to enact programmatic alternatives to the dominant austerity-based,

liberal-oriented paradigm. In other words, is the recent reform trajectory of the southern

European center-left a story of renewal and change, or of further political stagnation

and programmatic liberalization? More fundamentally, are there any signs of a

renewed policy paradigm emerging from such center-left governments in southern

Europe?

Branco et al. 631

To answer these questions, the study builds on an in-depth qualitative investiga-

tion of social policy and labor market reforms enacted by center-left governments in

Italy, Portugal, and Spain between 2014,

9

when European economic governance

began to soften its pressures for f‌iscal consolidation,

10

and 2023. We look at

whether and how these governments’reform agenda was enacted across three

policy areas: labor market regulation; the income maintenance system (unemploy-

ment benef‌its and minimum income schemes); and active labor market policies

and services. In analytical terms, we develop a coalitional approach focused on the

“political strategies”behind such reforms, that is, on what kind of transformations

of the welfare regimes they entailed and what coalition-formation processes sup-

ported them. More specif‌ically, we study partisan strategic maneuvering to pursue

social and labor reform in relation to both party system and social partnership dynam-

ics: our key analytical contention is that the jostling of social democratic parties to

attract electoral support and to ensure producer groups’buy-in must be examined

together because they have mutual implications in terms of opportunities and con-

straints. Variegated coalitional dynamics are embedded in choices, including, in a

nonhierarchical manner, whether to (1) pursue a governing strategy inclusive of

radical left parties or be more reliant on centrist allies and separate their political

fortune from leftist competitors (the “divided-left”scenario)

11

or (2) engage in polit-

ical exchange with producer groups in negotiated policymaking or follow a disinter-

mediation path.

12

This article makes two major empirical contributions. First, we depict signs of

vitality from the center-left where one would have least expected it, that is, in south-

ern Europe, where a novel policy paradigm emerged that we have termed “postin-

dustrial inclusive egalitarianism.”Such a paradigm entails not only a departure

from the previous decade(s) of austerity-driven reforms but also from the “stratif‌ied

expansion”that characterized earlier phases of welfare state development in

Mediterranean countries. Second, we f‌ind cross-case variation in the policy strate-

gies followed by southern European center-left parties facing broadly similar oppor-

tunities and constraints, depending on the strategic coalitional choices made by

parties’elites: our three cases show that, overall, stronger alliances with the

radical left parties have led to a greater role for trade unions and to more inclusive

policy packages. This goes to show that choices in the parliamentary and in the cor-

poratist arena are deeply intertwined, and that the unif‌ication of the left (in contrast

to the traditional divided scenario) can provide egalitarian policy solutions in

Mediterranean countries.

The article is organized as follows. The next section reviews the literature on social

and labor market policy reform in southern Europe, particularly in relation to social

democratic parties and politics. We then present the research design, after which we

introduce our analytical framework aimed at mapping and assessing the direction of

welfare and labor market reforms and associated political strategies. This is followed

by our three case studies and a comparative discussion on the varying empirical pat-

terns and their possible explanatory drivers. The conclusions brief‌ly restate and

discuss the main f‌indings.

632 Politics & Society 52(4)