THE SUBSIDIARIZATION OF SOCIAL POLICIES: ACTORS, PROCESSES AND IMPACTS

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to disentangle analytically the trends towards the subsidiarization of social policies in Europe addressing how the social policy reforms changed actors’ governance arrangements and altered the government scales involved over the last few decades. Following an introductory analysis of the main causes of the subsidiarization of social policies (sections 1 and 2), attention is devoted to the differences between welfare systems in Europe (section 3) and the way they influence the directions of change. The hypothesis is that, despite the fact that the subsidiarization of social policies is a converging rhetoric in most European countries’ social policy reforms, the impact of the process varies according to the specificities of the respective regulatory frames at the national or sub-national scales. This is exemplified in the final part of the paper (section 4) which considers the Italian case and the main critical dimensions that emerge through these processes.

Keywords:

• subsidiarity
• social policy
• Europe
• state spaces

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marco Arlotti for his help and for organizing and calculating the data for all tables. Stefania Sabatinelli should also be thanked for her comments. The anonymous reviewers helped focussing the contribution, forcing me to clarify some key conceptual issues. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

¹The origin of the concept of subsidiarity is strictly connected to the catholic social doctrine which, at the end of the nineteenth century (with the encyclical Rerum Novarum, 1891 by Pope Leo XIII), attempted to define a middle course between the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand, and the various forms of totalitarianism (Fascism, Communism, etc.), which subordinate the individual to the state, on the other (Waschkuhn 1995).

²In the European Union, the principle of subsidiarity was established in the Treaty of Maastricht (1992), and is part of the proposed new Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (Title 3, Art. I, 11). However, at the local level it was already a key element of the European Charter of Local Self-Government, an instrument of the Council of Europe promulgated in 1985 (see Article 4, Paragraph 3 of the Charter).

³Multi-level governance is another term used to grasp the complexities emerging in the interplay between these two processes of change. The term has been first used by Marks (1992) to capture developments in EU structural policy following its major reform in 1988. Subsequently, Marks et al. (1996) developed the concept of multi-level governance to apply it more broadly to the EU decision making process.

⁴If we take a more nuanced perspective, we immediately see that the timing of changes differed from country to country, for instance Scandinavian countries started the process of explicit decentralisation earlier (even in the 1960s), Italy and Spain in the 1970s, even though consequences started to be beard in the 1980s, according to the characteristics of the respective context of regulation and the overall business cycle.

⁵The degree of financial decentralisation is usually calculated considering the share of sub-national expenditure over the total public expenditure and the share of sub-national taxes on the total fiscal revenues at the national level. In our case, we have considered four indicators: (1) the share of sub-national expenditure of the total national expenditure; (2) the share of sub-national expenditure on the GDP; (3) the share sub-national taxes on the total sub-national revenues; (4) the sub-national taxes as a percentage on total taxes. For each country, the total score has been standardised, i.e., 0 = total absence of decentralization; 1= total decentralization.

⁶The concept of milieu defines a system of actors and structures which can be considered only through their complex mutual interactions, which define specific territorial conditions not re-producible elsewhere (DiGaetano and Strom 2003).

⁷Also the ideological frames which influenced historically the development of social policies in the two models differ. The catholic culture in the Mediterranean countries and the monarchical statism rooted in a bismarckian approach in continental European countries set the stage for the institutionalization of the deep differences (Alber 1982; Manow 2004).

⁸The familism index has been calculated considering five indicators: (1) single-parent households, as a percentage of all households with children, 2005; (2) divorce rate, per 1000 inhabitants, 2004; (3) births out of wedlock, as a percentage of the total live births, 2004; (4) men young people (18–34) living with parents, 2003; and (5) women young people (18–34) living with parents, 2003. The statism index has been calculated considering four indicators: (1) differential between at risk of poverty rate before and after social transfers, 2003; (2) social expenditure, as a percentage of GDP, 2002; (3) social expenditure in PPS per capita, 2002; and (4) total taxes as a percentage of GDP 2003. Source: Arlotti calculations on Eurostat (online statistics http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu); OECD (2005); European Foundation (2005). All variables have been standardized.

⁹The approval of the equalisation fund would change the current criteria of distribution of state transfers (based on the historical expenditure) with a system based more on real regional needs (Guerra and Zanardi 2006: 13).