This paper analyses the reform trajectories that are specific to continental European welfare systems, going beyond the idea that this third world of welfare capitalism is frozen. Comparing the reform trajectories in the different countries and sectors, shows that one can identify four successive sequences of reforms over the last 25 years (from reforms aimed at protecting the insured male worker to reforms aimed at re-structuring benefits, financing and governance arrangements). The paper shows that the trajectory followed by these systems has been highly determined by the typical Bismarckian welfare institutions, but also reversed by a learning process. The paper concludes that the consequences of these changes are increasing the insider/outsider cleavage. only subscribers can see the full article

In the last twenty years conditions favourable to populism in Europe have been created by a combination of two processes: a) the crisis of the mass parties and the transition from the «democracy of the parties» to the «democracy of the public»; b) the effects of globalizations, which have caused rapid changes in all national contexts, creating new problems and new social fractures, which have been difficult for the traditional parties to manage. In Italy populism has had more space and more influence than in other democratic countries because of the crisis and dissolution of the mass parties of the First Republic. Two kinds of populism established themselves in Italy. The first, the «regional populism» of the Northern League, which reacted to the potential fractures centre/fringes, North/South, and Italians/immigrants in a populist spirit. The second is the «media populism» of Berlusconi, who used the techniques of commercial marketing to bridge the distance between political leaders and citizens, and turned every election into a popular plebiscite around himself. only subscribers can see the full article

Globalization without global and national social policies to equalize the social costs and benefits of globalization will not be acceptable and sustainable in the longer run. The idea of comprehensive - and rights-based - social policies was firmly present when the Un Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. The neo-liberal turn in the 1980s and 1990s put economic growth and the market into the centre of the agenda and effectively marginalized the government and social policy, but the Un Social Summit in Copenhagen 1995 re-introduced the idea of «society for all» to the global development policy agenda. Recently, the Ilo has been instrumental in bridging again the gulf between the «economic» and the «social» by introducing the concepts «social dimension of globalization» and «decent work agenda». The reality is, however, that the Ilo and its national partners in the Ministries of Labour and social Affairs have little money and few partners to operationalize the decent work/comprehensive social policy agenda, while most of the capacity and funding is concentrated in the World Bank’s national partners in the Ministries of Finance. only subscribers can see the full article

The welfare state is a polysemic idea and the various social sciences have given different definitions of it, each of them underlining this or that aspect, depending on the epistemological attitude of their field. In studies of the theory of the state and constitutional law, by «welfare state» we mean a liberal state that uses taxation to carry out policies that actively redistribute wealth so as to guarantee a minimum level of wellbeing to all citizens, whatever their capacity to produce income (Mortati, 1973): it is clearly a definition that corresponds to a historical-institutional perspective, which in the framework of the development of forms of the state underlines the transformation of the «neutral» liberal state, under the effect of mass parties and reforming political and union movements, into an «interventionist» state.only subscribers can see the full article

Many words have been spent on globalization, but despite its increasing impact on people’s daily lives, even in the most remote corners of the planet, until very recently its social implications were largely disregarded.. For much of the 1980’s and ’90’s attention focussed on the economic face of globalization: on the growing interdependence between the different parts of the world in trade, investment, finance and the organization of production. Yet, at the same time a similar social and political interdependence was growing that — step by step — involved every continent and every country both at organizational and individual level. Today, thanks to the development of transport and, still more, thanks to the new communication technologies, physical distance is no longer the almost insuperable barrier it was in the past: we are all in some way closer and part of a single system. only subscribers can see the full article

Knowledge is the main productive force, changing the fundamental properties of the processes that lead to the production of economic value. Today these depend on the integration of technical intelligence, which is the result of modernity and the sources of reproducible knowledge, with the fluid intelligence of people, which has recently been rediscovered as a way of managing the complexity of a capitalism that, partly as a result of its global expansion, is now out of control. The growth in complexity has stemmed the power of technique and opened new spaces to the initiatives of those who, at their own risk, explore the new and the possible, going beyond the autonomatisms of early modernity.only subscribers can see the full article