Austerity and welfare reform in south-western Europe. A farewell to corporatism in Italy, Spain and Portugal?

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the current context of the economic and financial crisis on the consistency of the corporatist dynamic that has oriented governments, trade unions and employers’ associations towards consensus in Spain, Italy and Portugal over the past two decades. Following the analytical framework developed by Öbert et al. (2011), which understands corporatism as a process of political exchange, we analyse whether the conditions that make exchange possible have been altered during the crisis and, if it is the case, if such a transformation is cyclical or structural in nature. New limitations on the autonomy of national governments with regard to the design of socio-economic policies have arisen. These are related to the supervision of national politics by supranational institutions that has profoundly altered some of the basic requirements for corporatist political exchange: the mandate or sovereignty in decision-making and the value of the assets to be exchanged in the hands of the stakeholders.