Explaining Policy Trajectories of Regional Minimum Income Schemes in Italy and Spain

This chapter draws on the theoretical framework introduced above to provide an answer to the two empirical puzzles that lie at the core of this volume: explaining path departure and policy reversal in minimum income reforms in Italy and Spain. In particular, it interpret policy trajectories in the Italian and Spanish cases while demonstrating that alternative explanations do not sufficiently account for the observed trajectories. In particular, it emphasizes that while functional pressures, policy legacy and institutional architecture shaped the political process, political exchange and competition dynamics are crucial to understand the scope and direction of minimum income reforms. More precisely, the analysis reveals that the preferences and the strategic choices of the main interest groups active in the social assistance field—the socio-political demand—as well as the main properties of the party system—the supply—were conducive to different credit claiming dynamics, significantly affecting policy outputs in periods of fiscal restraint.