“Welfare cultures, family policies and path departure mechanisms: the case of childcare services in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna”
Laura Canale
Department of Political Sciences, University of Pavia
Contributed paper, Espanet Conference 6-8 September 2012, Edinburgh – Stream 12
Abstract
The present time is witnessing complex and pressing processes of welfare reform. In this context, one of the main challenges for European governments comes from the political activation in puzzling and powering over the so called new social risks, affecting an increasing number of European families. Among them, reconciliation policies, and in particular those aiming at strengthening childcare services, are largely affected by path dependent mechanisms, based on the historical stabilization of ideational and material forces inside the political process. But what happens when self-reinforcing institutional mechanisms are no longer sustainable from a societal and economic point of view and change is needed?
Theoretically combining Ferrera’s ‘models of solidarity’ and the ideational perspective of Pfau Effinger’s welfare cultures, an explanation of path departure processes in family policies is provided.This interpretative frame is then applied to the case study of childcare services in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. This last choice was based on the peculiarities of the two regional governments. On the one hand, Lombardy is a clear example of a stable Christian-democratic politics, while Emilia-Romagna has been, since the immediate post-war period, the ‘stronghold’ of the communist power in Italy. On the other hand, the two political communities are quite similar for what regards the main relevant factors influencing family policies: the legislative framework at the national level, the geographical and economical context, the labour market, the rate of women employment, demographic trends, immigration rates and social capital. This homogeneity between the two regional cases allows the use of Mill’s Method of Difference, leading to the detection of the independent causal contribution of welfare cultures to the development of childcare policies.
Introduction[1]
EU governments are concerned with complex processes of welfare state reform. These phenomena are fuelled by a series of political, economic and societal factors, mainly connected with the decelerating economic growth of the last decades, no longer able to sustain the distributive policies of the Trente Glorieuses (Ferrera, 2006), and with the multiplication of social needs as a response tothe ‘incomplete revolution’ of women’s role (Esping Andersen 2009), but also to the challengescoming from demographic trends and post fordist labour markets (Bonoli et al. 2000; Ferrera and Hemerijck, 2003). The capacity of governments to cope with this critical redesign of social protection implies, on the one hand, the activation of effective puzzling around new social risks (Taylor Gooby, 2004), and, on the other hand, the use of power[2] resources to mobilize new electoral coalitions, more sensitive to the issues of reconciliation between care and work, life-long learning, equal opportunities of men and women, or social inclusion of the migrants, than those prevailing in the years of welfare state development in the post war period (Bonoli, 2007). The alternative scenario is welfare retrenchment, in the light of neoliberal arguments claiming for the progressive disengagement of the State as for what concerns social needs, and with the hope that those spaces of social life no more ‘guarded’ by the institutionalized solidarities of the welfare state will be covered by individual responsibility.
Puzzling and powering over new social risks but also welfare retrenchment do not take place in a vacuum: gender relations, the meaning of motherhood and fatherhood, good childhood and intergeneration solidarities are the cultural sediment of social, political and economic paths undertaken by each European state some century ago (Barbagli and Kertzer, 2003) and still influencing political courses of action. Values implied by these family issues belong to any given society and do condition, on the one hand, social behaviour of individuals,and, on the other hand, political strategies as for what concerns the search for electoral consensus. This last point is particularly relevant when trying to analyse political reforms, as the capacity of politicians to change existing path, in particular in family policies, depends not only on the support of interest groups lobbing for change but also on the ability to articulate the political discourse in a way that underlines the consistency between dominant cultural values in a given society and the undertaken reforms[3].
Within this context, the paper focuses on a particular field of family policies, that is childcare services. Paragraph 1 will be devoted to the disclosure of the ontological and epistemological assumptions on which theresearchwas built. Paragraph 2 presents the analytical framework applied to the case study as the result of the integration between Ferrera’s ‘models of solidarity’ (1993) and welfare cultures (Oorschot et al., 2008), while paragraph 3 contains the main findings of the PhD researchproject, conducted between 2009 and 2011, on the two cases of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. The last paragraph offers some final remarks as a contribution to the debate on path dependence and path departure mechanisms in the context of welfare state reforms.
- Historical Institutionalism, institutional change and ideational dynamics: critical junctures and gradual transformations
This paper is based on a neo weberian ontological assumption, seeing reality as a continuous flow of events, and the researcher as putting the light on a reasoned ‘selection’ of those events. Due to this premise, any research in the social and political field is inevitably culturally oriented in its outset; nonetheless, objectivity of the results is guaranteed by the logical connection between causes and effects, due to the rules of experience applied to the case study by the researcher. Academic gathering of knowledge over social phenomena continuously strengthens those rules of experience (Weber, 1904).
Given this ontological assumption, Historical Institutionalism (HI) seems the most appropriate methodological approach aiming at the reconstruction of causal chains in political processes. As a matter of fact, HI looks at social phenomena with a peculiar attention to processes unfolding over time, searching for a diachronic explanation of present events. This approach does not content with the description of a portion of reality ‘as a snapshot’, but it traces the steps that led to a particular outcome, trying to explain how and why an institutional framework emerged in the course of time in a given political community. Most of all, HI looks at individuals as social actors moved by material and ideal factors - at the same time rationally and value oriented - this leading to a more accurate reconstruction of the agential mechanisms implied in institution building and stabilization, that the one offered by rational choice and sociological institutionalisms (Hall and Taylor, 1996, 940). This point is particularly consistent with the weberian ontological assumption at the heart of the analysis.
Nonetheless, historical institutionalism looks at institutional change mainly through the lenses of critical junctures, leading to path departure processes (Pierson, 2000; Mahoney, 2000). Besides, HI is somehow resilient to recognize a significant role to ideas for the explanation of institutional change were a critical juncture is not active (Hay, 2006). Many authors now claim for a better use of ideational dynamics to entirely catch the mechanisms of path departure in institutional settings (Steinmo, 2008). To this end, a very promising framework for analysis seems to be that of welfare culturesas relating:
to the relevant collective meanings in a given society surrounding the welfare state, and to the way the welfare state is embedded in society. The welfare culture comprises doctrines, values, and ideals in relation to the relevant social actors, the institutions of the welfare state and concrete policy measures refer […] Welfare culture is not necessarily ordered and logically consistent. According to this approach it is important to assume that collective constructions of meaning are produced and reproduced by the social practices of social actors. Through conflicts, negotiation processes and discourses between social actors, welfare cultures can also change. Various groups in society may have their specific perceptions of the actual or preferred welfare culture, and welfare cultures may contain ambiguous and even contradicting elements (Oorschot, Opielka, Pfau-Effinger 2008, 11)
On the one hand, welfare cultures contributed to the institutional inertia of the political systems in facing welfare states reforms during the last decades. On the other hand, being the result of ideational processes, they can account for the agencial mechanisms leading to institutional change through political discourseand, correspondingly, of social ‘permeability’ to those ideals. The political discourse needs to take into account the prevailing welfare culture when trying to design a new course of action in family policies, as reforms could be hampered by the societal resistance to change. Nevertheless, when a politician ‘picks up’ the signals coming from a changing society and translates it into an appropriate public policy, this could result in a gain in legitimization among the electorate (Stoppino, 2001). These cultural mechanisms are stably interweaved with the material interests of the distributive coalitions pressing for the maintenance of their social rights.
2. Ferrera’s ‘models of solidarity’ and welfare state reforms: what role for welfare cultures?
In 1993, Maurizio Ferrera[4] developed a new classification of the advanced welfare states based on their ‘coverage format’, i.e. the degree of inclusiveness of social insurance schemes. This classification distinguishes between pure occupational (i.e. work-related), mixed occupational, mixed universalistic, and pure universalistic welfare states, and is strongly based on an heuristic scheme which takes into account socio-economic, cultural-institutional and party-political factors. The answer to the main question lying at the heart of any contemporary welfare system, ‘who are we going to protect?’, largelydepends on political processes legitimating a particular definition of the coverage format which is, in turn, the result of the material and ideational factors prevailing through time in a given political community and leading to a well defined solidarity model. These complex political processes always start with a problem pressure, due to economic and social factors undermining old policy solutions. At some point in time, actors simultaneous activation in the socio-economic field as in the political domain to respond to such environmental changes flows into the arena of political competition and the search for consensus is then translated in a given course of action leading to social policy reforms: in Ferrera’s view, universalistic and occupational welfare states originated exactly from this kind of cyclic dynamics.
This analytical framework fits quite well with our ontological and methodological assumptions, in particular for what concerns historical institutionalism, and accounts for the main factors influencing institutional change in periods of crisis ( i.e. critical junctures). Nonetheless, some more attention to the role of ideas is needed to fully comprehend, on the one hand the importance of values and symbols, especially in the field of family policies, influencing social behaviour and its potential resistance to change (also in periods of crisis) and, on the other hand, the ‘nature’ and ‘intensity’ of change, being it a third order change resulting in a paradigm shift or a first or second order change, in case of ‘normal policymaking’ (Hall, 1993). Welfare cultures can help exactly to understand these phenomena, putting a light on the importance of collective meanings surrounding the welfare state as factors influencing the direction of institutional change.
The analytical framework of this research was then built as a synthesis of Ferrera’s models of solidarity and the ‘cultural foundations of the welfare state as ideas of the good society’ analysed in the book by Oorschot, Opielka and Pfau-Effinger. Due to reasons of space, this ‘synergy’ has been summarized in the following scheme, connecting the two approaches.
Fig. 1 . Ferrera’s ‘models of solidarity’and their ideological foundations as welfare cultures
Ferrera’s ‘models of solidarity’ / Ideological foundations of welfare cultures (Oorschot, Opielka and Pfau Effinger [2008])OCCUPATIONAL
(sui generis[5]: United States)
Pure[6]
Mixed[7]
UNIVERSALISTIC
(sui generis: Australia)
Mixed[8]
Pure[9] / Neo-liberalism/social liberalism[10]
Conservatism[11]
Conservativereformism[12]
Reformist liberalism[13]
Social democratic tradition[14]
Ferrera’s classification, which was elaborated in 1993, is not the picture of a frozen landscape, as recent welfare state reforms are putting under pressure those same solidarity models, and it is possible that the position of some country, inside the continuum between pure universalistic and the United States ‘underdeveloped’ occupational model, during the last decades somehow changed[15]. The potentiality of Ferrera’s interpretative schemeis then exactly to tracewelfare states ‘movements’ between clusters.
The theoretical framework applied in the PhD research rests on the idea that crises can lead welfare systems to a ‘category shift’, and that when such a phenomenon happens we can define it as a ‘path departure’ one. This shift always implies a third order change as it results in a repositioning among solidarity models and, automatically, among ‘ideological foundations’ of welfare systems, so altering the underlying policy paradigm. The problem is then to ‘track’ such changes as they can take the shape of a radical and rapid change or of an incremental process of change, breakdown and replacement or gradual transformation in Streek and Thelen’s scheme (2005). This is exactly the case of childcare policies in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna.
3. A ‘path dependent approach’ to the case of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna: the study of childcare policies development
Depending on the ontological and methodological premises discussed in paragraph 1, this paragraph focuses on the importance of welfare cultures as a relevant explanatory factor of the different trajectories of childcare policies in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, immediately after the Second World War. The selection was based on the peculiarities of the two meso-governments. On the one hand, Lombardy is a clear example of a long period of stable Christian-democratic politics while Emilia-Romagna has been the ‘stronghold’ of the communist power in Italy until recent times. On the other hand, since the immediate post war period, the two political communities have been quite similar for what regards the main relevant factors influencing family policies: the legislative frame at the national level, the geographical and economical context, the labour market, the rate of women employment, demographic trends, immigration rates and social capital. This homogeneity between the two regional cases allows the use of Mill’s Method of Difference, leading to the detection of the independent causal contribution of the welfare culture in each case of regional family policies.
Path dependent analysis of the two cases will consider three periods: the first one from the after war to the end of the sixties, the second one from the seventies to the end of the eighties and the last one from the beginning of the nineties to the present time.
3.1 From the after war period to the end of the sixties
The years immediately after the Second World War saw a relevant number of Italian women leaving the labour market (Betti, 2009). This phenomenon, which spread also in the rest of Europe due to the ‘proliferation’ of the fordist family and of the male breadwinner model, was particularly intense in Italy, where it was welcome by a very conservative and catholic oriented welfare culture (Saraceno 2007; Naldini 2003). Since the beginning of the Restoration[16], the Roman Catholic Church found in women a strong ally for the re-establishment of religiosity all over the Continent (Kersbergen, 2008). In this picture the woman, wife and mother, was the home’s heart and soul and this is one of the main reasons why the ‘domestic ideology’ became the most characteristic value of the new European middle class in family issues (Barbagli and Kertzer, 2003). Nonetheless, during the Nineteenth Century only bourgeois women could stay home without working, while proletarian ones were secondary wage earners. In Italy, in the after war period, an increasing number of women could finally choose a domestic life instead of taking a ‘poor quality job’, caring for their children and relatives inside the new fordist family. This ‘long period’ trends account for the absence of a problem pressure concerning childcare facilities during the Golden Age, in Italy.
In the fifties an ‘economic boom’ got a foothold in Italy, starting from the North of the peninsula, and especially in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. As a matter of fact, the two regions were quite similar for what regards geographical features, regional economy, education levels, social capital and immigration rate from the South. Most of all, women’s political participation in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagnawas the highest in the country (Forlenza, 2008). Therefore,Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, since the end of the Second World War, rapidly became two of the most developed areas of the country, but strong differences were emerging, in the same period, between the two regions as for what concerns political preferences and welfare cultures in family matters.