South Europe: reclaiming welfare post-crisis?

Maria Petmesidou and Ana Marta Guillén

Chapter 14 in Handbook on Austerity, Populism and the Welfare State, 2021, pp 186-206 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter examines whether the austerity-induced reforms in South Europe, over much of the 2010s, have reconfigured the scope and scale of the public welfare systems, undermined political trust and nurtured populism. The analysis highlights cross-country trends in modernizing/rationalizing the main pillars of the welfare state prior to the Great Recession. It traces convergence in the thrust of retrenchment and flexibilization under prolonged austerity and external conditionality in the wake of the financial and debt crisis and assesses how far in the last few years recovery has spurred some reform reversals. Further, it unpicks the significance of the surge/revival of left and/or right-leaning populist movements and ideas in the last decade and the cross-country varying electoral success of a populist social agenda. Against this backdrop some preliminary considerations are raised as to how South European societies are navigating the covid-19 storm.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789906738/9781789906738.00021.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19250_14

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().