Defrosting the Spanish Welfare State: the Weight of Conservative Components

This paper analyses social policy reform in the past 30 years in Spain from a novel point of view, namely, that of the institutional capabilities of Bismarckian welfare states to reinvent themselves and to successfully adapt to an era of austerity and open economic competition. After a brief introduction aiming at signaling the main characteristics of Spain from the political and economic point of view, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section assesses the degree of “Bismarckianism” of the Spanish welfare state at the point of departure of the present study, that is, in the mid 70s, when Spain started its transition from an authoritarian regime to a full democracy. It also considers how the institutional set-up of the Spanish welfare state might be expected to have impacted on the nature and timing of welfare state reforms. The second section focuses on the sequences of the reform trajectory from the 1980s to present. For each sequence of reform, the problems posed, the policy-making process, and the outcomes are spelt out. The third section is devoted to the explanation of the Spanish pattern of change. It shows how the concurrence of political, economic and social challenges allowed for the upsurge of windows of reform and paradigmatic policy changes in Spain that were absent in other national cases. It also shows how both policy challenges and policy solutions were similar to those of other Bismarckian welfare states, especially in those areas of social policy that remained organized along corporatist lines, i.e., income maintenance. The concluding section characterizes the present welfare system. It argues that, indeed, more has occurred than is usually recognized in the realm of Bismarckian social policies. In Spain, such developments were largely due to internal specificities, the pressures posed by European integration and learning processes but they have also been facilitated by the initial institutional design of the Spanish welfare state.