The role of the left to the path to a minimum income policy in Italy

ABSTRACT

In 2018, Italy became the last of the E.U. member states to introduce a minimum income policy. Our work helps explain why Italy was a laggard in this field by investigating the role the Italian left played, historically, in the evolution of policies to combat poverty. This is a surprisingly neglected topic. We argue that until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Italian left focused on labour-market insiders – that is, full-time core workers – and appeared largely unconcerned about the most vulnerable individuals, the outsiders, thus accepting the lack of policies to combat poverty. The policy status quo, however, dovetailed with a lively debate among left-wing intellectuals and politicians. This debate paved the way for several attempts by left-wing governments in the 1990s to implement a national pilot scheme (called the Reddito Minimo di Inserimento [R.M.I.]) along with local minimum income policies. The electoral success in 2013 of a new populist movement, the Five-star Movement (M.5.s.), campaigning on the flagship project of the Reddito di Cittadinanza (R.d.C.), fuelled the political debate on anti-poverty policies. This electoral ‘threat’ finally convinced the centre-left government under Paolo Gentiloni to establish in 2018 the Reddito di Inclusione, the first minimum income scheme in Italy. Our work demonstrates the importance of political variables, such as the structure and dynamics of party competition, in the fight against poverty. It also highlights the role of the Italian left as a political innovator in this field.

RIASSUNTO

Nel 2018, l’Italia è diventata l’ultimo degli Stati membri dell’UE a introdurre una misura di reddito minimo. Il nostro lavoro contribuisce a spiegare perché l’Italia è approdata così tardivamente a una simile misura, indagando il ruolo che la sinistra italiana ha storicamente svolto nell’evoluzione delle politiche di lotta alla povertà. Si tratta di un argomento sorprendentemente trascurato. La nostra tesi è che fino alla caduta del Muro di Berlino, la sinistra italiana si è concentrata sugli insiders del mercato del lavoro – cioè i lavoratori dipendenti a tempo pieno e indeterminato – senza apparentemente preoccuparsi degli individui più vulnerabili, gli outsiders, legittimando in questo modo l’assenza di una politica di lotta alla povertà in quanto tale. Lo status quo politico si è, tuttavia, accompagnato a un vivace dibattito tra gli intellettuali e i politici di sinistra. Questo dibattito ha aperto la strada a diversi tentativi da parte dei governi di centro-sinistra negli anni ‘90 di avviare sperimentazioni nazionali insieme a politiche locali di reddito minimo. Il successo elettorale nel 2013 di un nuovo movimento populista, il Movimento 5 stelle (M.5.s.), che ha fatto del Reddito di Cittadinanza (R.d.C.) la sua bandiera politica, ha alimentato il dibattito pubblico sulle politiche contro la povertà. Questa ‘minaccia’ elettorale ha contribuito a far sì che il governo di centro-sinistra guidato da Paolo Gentiloni istituisse nel 2018 il Reddito di Inclusione (R.E.I.), il primo schema di reddito minimo in Italia. Il nostro lavoro dimostra, da un lato, l’importanza delle variabili politiche, come la struttura e la dinamica della competizione partitica, nelle politiche di contrasto della povertà e, dall’altro, il ruolo di innovatore politico svolto dalla sinistra in Italia.

KEYWORDS:

• Italian left
• minimum income policy
• party competition
• Partito Democratico (P.D.)

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Sinistra Italiana
• politica di reddito minimo
• competizione partitica
• Partito Democratico (PD)

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for their constructive comments to previous versions of this article to Massimo Baldini, Paolo Bosi, Andrea Brandolini, Cristiano Gori, Maria Cecilia Guerra, Alessandro Martelli and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal.

This article is a result of a joint effort by the authors. However, for formal purposes only, Rosa Mulè wrote sections 3, 4, 5 and Stefano Toso wrote 1 and 2.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. To be sure, other socio-economic factors were important in accounting for the evolution of minimum income policies in Italy. These included an initial welfare state set-up that was less developed than those of other advanced European countries, and the economic gap between the North and the South of the country. See Ferrera et al. (2012), Giorgi and Pavan (2021b), and Saraceno et al. (2022).

^2. Authors’ translation.

^3. Authors’ translation.

^4. Ermanno Gorrieri (1920–2004) was a partisan commander in the Italian Resistance, an Italian politician, a representative of democratic and social Catholicism, a member of Parliament and Minister of Labour in the Fanfani government (April-July 1987). He was one of the founders of the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), a major Italian trade union confederation founded in 1950. He founded with Pierre Carniti the Movimento dei cristiano-sociali, an Italian political movement that was active from 1993 to 1998, and contributed to the birth of the Democratici di Sinistra (Democrats of the Left, DS) in 1998 and the P.D. in 2007.

^5. The relative poverty line for a two-person household coincided – and still does, although the Italian Institute of Statistics (.I.S.T.A.T.) has also been estimating absolute poverty annually for almost twenty years – with per capita consumption expenditure, taken from national accounts data. In order to calculate the relative poverty line for households other than those consisting of one couple, the Carbonaro equivalence scale is applied. This is a scale estimated by the Gorrieri Commission and still used for the purposes of compiling official statistics (Commissione di indagine sulla povertà 1985).

^6. The relative near-poverty threshold for a couple was set at 120 per cent of per capita consumption expenditure.

^7. The neologism ‘selective universalism’ would be taken up again about fifteen years later by the Commission for the analysis of the macroeconomic compatibility of social spending (the so-called ‘Onofri Commission’) and would represent the loadstone by which legislators would orient themselves – this was the Commission’s wish – in reforming public spending on assistance, with particular reference to revision of the means-testing criteria, the advent of a new means-test based on a linear combination of income and wealth, the introduction of the Minimo Vitale and other minor non-categorical schemes (Commissione per l’analisi delle compatibilità della spesa sociale 1997a, 1997b). On the gap between the Commission’s proposals and what was actually realized, and on the reasons behind the gap, see Brandolini (2008).

^8. The work of the Commission chaired by Pierre Carniti (1993–1997) and Chiara Saraceno (1997–2001) also received a lukewarm reception from policymakers. In 2000, the Commission was renamed the Commission of Enquiry into Social Exclusion and was headed until 2001 by Chiara Saraceno. Subsequently, Giancarlo Rovati (2002–2005 and 2005–2008), Marco Revelli (2008–2010) and Luigi Fabbris (2010–2012) served as presidents of the Commission. The only exception to the attitude of institutional semi-indifference to the Commission’s reports is represented by the involvement of Chiara Saraceno, at that time also an advisor to the Minister for Social Welfare, Livia Turco, in the legislative design of the measures piloting the R.M.I. (discussed below in section 3). For an overview of the uneasy relationship between statistics and politics, with specific reference to the Italian debate on poverty, see Brandolini (2021).

^9. However, with the Finance Law for 2018, R.E.I. was strengthened: from 1 July 2018, the categorical requirements previously in force, i.e. residing in a household with at least one child or a disabled offspring of any age or a pregnant woman or an unemployed person over fifty-five without social security benefits, were abolished. R.E.I. thus became to all intents and purposes a universal income support measure, aimed at poor families as such.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosa Mulè

Rosa Mulè is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna. Her research interests concern comparative welfare states, political economy, comparative methods, gender, political and economic inequality. She has published several articles and books on the topic of income redistribution, the welfare state, social shock absorbers, gender inequality and political economy. Her recent publications include Gendering the political economy of labour market policies, Routledge, 2023 (with Roberto Rizza).

Stefano Toso

Stefano Toso is Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna and Research Fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of Public Policies at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His research focuses on the theory of inequality and poverty measurement; the reform of personal income taxation; the distributional impact of the tax-benefit system on child poverty and the scope for policy reforms; the intergenerational transmission of inequality and social mobility. He has published several articles and books on policies to combat poverty. His recent publications include La finanza pubblica italiana. Rapporto 2021, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2022 (with Massimo Baldini, eds.).