THE CONTRACTUAL APPROACH TO WELFARE STATE REFORM.

In recent years, welfare state reforms have been characterized by a contractual approach to policy design that puts personal responsibility at the foremost. The most evident consequence of this new approach is that individuals get entitled to public support only giving proof of being active in the labour market whenever possible (OECD, 2018). A link gets therefore established between public support and individual behaviour, with the former being conditional upon the latter. Commonly, this link is being activated as soon as individuals sign a job action plan, which share many features with a contract in the formal sense. Any job action plan specifies individuals’ rights and duties. Particularly, a job action plan specifies the obligations that individuals have to fulfil to get welfare assistance. The rationales behind this approach are pretty clear. First, by requiring additional obligations, usually in the form of participation in active programmes, the contract aims at increasing the pool of readily employable workers. Second, as the required obligations make less desirable being on welfare rolls, individuals who are unemployed should prefer job rather than welfare. Third, denying the opportunity of a free lunch should strengthen the belief that active behaviour is due and welfare support must go hand in hand with personal responsibility: this might induce a persistent change in social norms. Convergence theories, suggesting that similarities in context and structure between European welfare states will produce a common model, have been recently revitalized by the widespread evidence of pressures for spending cutbacks coupled with measures to promote more flexibility in the labour market (Taylor-Gooby et al. 2018). There are reasons to argue, however, that below the umbrella provided by these elements, path-dependency is at work. The aim of this research project is to examine – both theoretically and empirically - the main characteristics of the aforementioned contractual approach to welfare polity design using information on key reforms implemented in Europe in recent years. First, a comprehensive framework to classify reforms according to the consistency with the principle of personal responsibility will be provided. The aim is to highlight that beside marginal cutbacks and the strengthening of means-testing, many governments are implementing new forms of interventionism that de facto diminish the role of responsibility and weaken the cogency of the obligations arising from the contract conditioning welfare support. Thus, behind an apparently homogeneous reality, profound differences are detectable in national trajectories of welfare state reforms. In relation to this, a key point to be investigated is related to the kind of welfare measures that can be truly considered as consistent with a contractual approach based on personal responsibility: there are indeed attempts, in Europe, to characterize along these lines also the provision of a universal basic income. The empirical section of the project aims at understanding which variant of the approach grounded in personal responsibility is actually able to deliver better outcomes and whether failures of the approach can be explained by trends in the views shared by public officials, who do not correctly implement what is required. In particular, two new (OECD) indicators that capture universalism directly - the percentage of social benefits that are means or income tested, and the proportion of private spending in total social expenditures - will be used in cross-country regressions, among other variables also capturing key institutional characteristics of the benefit system, to verify whether a focus a focus on personal responsibility is able to deliver better outcomes in terms of unemployment rates, unemployment spell, activity rates, savings in the amount of resources devoted to finance welfare benefits.