Flexibilising the Labour Maket: Who Wants to Loosen Employment Protection Legislation in Italy?

This paper investigates the political economy of recent labour market reforms implemented in Italy. Using fixed-effects ordered logit models, 2011-13 panel survey data on preferences for a reduction in employment protection legislation are analysed. The results are in line with the insider-outsider theory (Rueda, 2005): self-employed, managers and  professional are in favour of such institutional change as are seniors and retired who are not concerned by this kind of reform. Support from the “outsiders” is expressed by unemployed but not atypical workers. Ideologically, leftist and centrist voters seem against it, as people feeling close to trade unions. Comparing our results with findings on the 2013 voting behaviour, we claim that the current incumbents’ political strategy is not as paradoxical as it seems for coalition governments led by the main left-wing party. At odds with the idea of socialist parties defending “insiders” unionised workers, both the main leftist and centrist parties in the coalition are in fact gaining greater consensus among the social groups that are the most favourable to labour market flexibilisation. Moreover, by pleasing these constituencies, this political strategy is perfectly consistent with a general tendency towards a more neoliberal type of capitalism in Italy, as well establish in the literature (see among others Amable et al (2012) and Jackson and Deeg (2012)).