Labour Market Protection and Family Policy in High-Income Countries.
Continuity and Change (1990-2020)

Federico Danilo Filetti
Sciences Po - CRIS & LIEPP

Thesis defense, Thursday 17 November 2022, 3pm, at Sciences Po, room K.011.

Jury: Rossella Ciccia, Associate Professor of Social Policy, University of Oxford (reviewer)
Emanuele Ferragina, Associate Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po (supervisor)
Olivier Giraud, Senior Researcher, CNRS-Cnam-Lise
Angela Greulich,Full Professor of Sociologie, Sciences Po
Martin Seeleib-Kaiser, Professor of Comparative Public Policy, University of Tübingen (reviewer)

This dissertation employs a mix-methods research design to investigate processes of welfare state change through the prism of labour market protection and family policy, the two social policy areas that underwent the most noticeable transformations over the last three decades (1990-2020).
This investigation builds on the insights developed in the regime varieties literature (i.e., Worlds of Welfare, Varieties of Capitalism and École de la Régulation) and the debate bridging regime varieties and accounts of welfare state change (i.e., Varieties of Liberalization).

Our measure of labour market protection and family policy makes it possible to overcome the increasingly unrealistic Average Production Worker assumption, simultaneously accounting for dimensions of protection related to both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social risks. Labour market protection and family policy continuity and change are analysed quantitatively by employing Principal Component Analysis and two multidimensional scores to gather a holistic perspective on policy similarities and differences across countries and over time, and on the relationships between institutional arrangements and labour market outcomes.
The historical process-tracing of labour market protection and family policy reforms in Italy and France complements this investigation, and helps to observe details on policy and welfare state change that are invisible to quantitative descriptive methods.

This work contributes to the literature in five ways, by:
 1) providing new typologies of labour market protection (Central/Northern European, Southern European and liberal) and family policy (social democratic, commodified and residual) varieties resulting from three decades of institutional change;
 2) developing a series of country-specific taxonomies of labour market protection (liberalization, dualization, flexibility, de-dualization and higher protection) and family policy (de-Scandinization, partial de-Scandinization, partial Scandinization and Scandinization) trajectories of change;
 3) showing that the path-dependency hypothesis developed in the welfare state change literature is partially rejected for labour market protection, while it mostly holds for family policy;
 4) specifying, through historical process-tracing, that the labour market and family policy trajectories of change identified in previous contributions and in the quantitative analysis do not capture the full spectrum of the changes occurring in Italy and France; and
 5) showing that trajectories of change can be dynamic – in other words, a country can move from one trajectory to another over-time.