2020
DOI: 10.1111/1475-6765.12414
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Under pressure. Economic constraints, electoral politics and labour market reforms in Southern Europe in the decade of the Great Recession

Abstract: Even when subject to comparable exogenous constraints during the Eurozone crisis and in its immediate aftermath, governments in Southern Europe have pursued distinct labour market reform agendas. What room for manoeuvre did governments of crisis-struck peripheral countries really have in shaping their labour market reform strategies, and how can we account for the observed variation? We address these questions by making a twofold contribution to the debate on the political economy of austerity in the Eurozone … Show more

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Cited by 36 publications
(33 citation statements)
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“…Instead, these authors suggest that parties that felt compelled to liberalize the labour market have chosen reform strategies that sought to exempt different groups for electoral reasons. While Portugal’s PS, for example, initially aimed at limiting liberalisation for their insider voters, the Italian Partito Democratico under Matteo Renzi embraced a liberalisation agenda (see also Picot and Tassinari, 2017), which sought to create what Bulfone and Tassinari (2020, p.6) call a ‘centrist pro-EU coalition’, that is, a voter coalition that includes managers, sociocultural and technical professionals, non-unionized private-sector workers, and highly skilled atypical workers and which therefore relied much less on labour market insiders. Hence, ‘reform strategies are not only shaped by the extant composition of parties’ electorates and by the imperative of protecting or retaining the support of groups that are preserves of a given party family (…).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
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“…Instead, these authors suggest that parties that felt compelled to liberalize the labour market have chosen reform strategies that sought to exempt different groups for electoral reasons. While Portugal’s PS, for example, initially aimed at limiting liberalisation for their insider voters, the Italian Partito Democratico under Matteo Renzi embraced a liberalisation agenda (see also Picot and Tassinari, 2017), which sought to create what Bulfone and Tassinari (2020, p.6) call a ‘centrist pro-EU coalition’, that is, a voter coalition that includes managers, sociocultural and technical professionals, non-unionized private-sector workers, and highly skilled atypical workers and which therefore relied much less on labour market insiders. Hence, ‘reform strategies are not only shaped by the extant composition of parties’ electorates and by the imperative of protecting or retaining the support of groups that are preserves of a given party family (…).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Hence, ‘reform strategies are not only shaped by the extant composition of parties’ electorates and by the imperative of protecting or retaining the support of groups that are preserves of a given party family (…). They can also serve the function of constructing or consolidating a new social bloc by attracting support from groups contested amongst different party families (…)’ (Bulfone and Tassinari, 2020, p.5). Therefore, although further research is clearly needed in this regard, at this point, we cannot argue that the electoral relevance of insider voters for SDs solves our puzzle.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…To explore these questions, we analyse the case of Portugal, the southern European country in which the fall in the wage share has been the most dramatic due to internal devaluation policies (Cruces et al, 2015;ILO, 2018ILO, , 2019, but also the one in which political shifts to the left and policy reversals as regards internal devaluation policies started earlier than elsewhere (in 2015) and had wider scope (Branco et al, 2019;Bulfone and Tassinari, 2020).…”
Section: Questions Guiding Our Researchmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Reversals occurred only when governments’ ideological make-up changed, as in the cases of Portugal in 2015, and Spain and Italy in 2018 (Branco et al, 2019). It has been suggested, however, that while policy strategies have had an impact on reversing ‘corollary measures’, such as those on temporary employment, minimum wages and unemployment protection, they have not led to the reversing of ‘core measures’ of deregulation, aimed at shifting towards export-led growth, such as dismissal procedures and collective bargaining decentralisation (Bulfone and Tassinari, 2020). Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how a government strategy to reverse the core elements of deregulation would be compatible with EMU constraints, and how the limits on the scope of policy reversals (full or partial) influence collective bargaining dynamics and coverage, not to mention trade union bargaining power.…”
Section: Internal Devaluation Labour Market Institutions and Economic Inequalitymentioning
confidence: 99%
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