The political economy of labour market reforms in Italy and the UK: Convergence for Different Reasons?

An extensive literature has examined the impact of Europeanization and globalization on the distinctive institutions of welfare capitalism found in advanced democracies. Our contribution is to compare policy developments in the area of labour markets in two very different cases (Italy and the UK), a useful test for convergence theories. We find that there is clear evidence of moves in a convergent direction in these two cases, but that there are various obvious obstacles to full convergence, and the two cases remain far apart. We conclude that pressures for convergence affect the available policy recipes that political leaders can call upon, but that the existing institutional configurations at the national level represent a powerful constraint on reforms. In the two cases studied here, policy makers drew on available templates of 'best practice' but were only able to adopt reforms that were consistent with existing institutional frameworks. The resulting configurations lack coherence and may perform no better than the unreformed institutions.