Learning under pressure: Welfare state responses to Covid-19 in Southern Europe

Mediterranean welfare states have generally been treated as a homogeneous group; a ‘family of sinners’ that requires structural reforms to tackle persistent problems. While this applied until the Great Recession, new evidence suggests significant departures from this trajectory. Why did Mediterranean countries move from dualization and retrenchment to more generous measures in 2020, especially in outsiders’ protection? Taking the pandemic as a symmetric shock, we investigate welfare state responses in three Mediterranean regimes - Spain, Portugal and Italy. We find that, while all three departed from past austerity logics, Spain adopted a more encompassing response, entailing generous support towards both core and peripheral workers. Italy and Portugal, instead, persisted in a dual model of core segment protection with transfers for the most vulnerable. Drawing on interview and documentary data, we explain this divergence with the interplay between policy learning on the Left and patterns of ‘crisis corporatism’.