Childcare and Activation on the Social Policy Agendas in Southern Europe

Recent studies have shown that most advanced capitalist democracies have started to recalibrate their welfare state institutions to a knowledge economy and to the needs of new social risk groups. The idea of social investment emphasizes the need to move beyond purely transfer-oriented social consumption policies of an industrial welfare state towards future-oriented social investment policies (family policy, activation, education). But the extent to which countries have implemented social investment varies a lot across regions. Southern European countries, most notably Greece and Italy, are usually being described as the laggards. We still know, however, surprisingly little about what factors might explain the variation in social investment outcomes. Building on a self-collected database on family and labor market policy reforms, aggregate spending data and micro-level data, the paper focuses on how institutional legacies and societal demands translate into different social investment agendas. The consumption-oriented heritage of Southern European welfare states coupled with a comparatively low societal demand for social investment has lead to a narrow social investment agenda that is almost exclusively focused on targeted outsider-support and barely puts any emphasis on family policies. With the onset of the Great Recession, austerity has been placed over social investment and thereby further curtailed the already marginal social investment agenda in Southern Europe.