Beyond continuity? Italian social assistance policies between institutional opportunities and agency

The article addresses recent developments of social assistance policies in Italy with two interpretative aims. The first regards the approval of the long-awaited framework law in 2000 and deals with the factors that made a path-shifting national reform possible in a policy sector which had evolved through successive accretions and gradual revisions. The second regards the effectiveness of the reform, providing an assessment of the (scant) achievements subsequent to its adoption. The reform process was investigated through a model that combines factors of historical neo-institutionalist derivation and agency dynamics, the latter of which is intended to overcome the structuralist bias of purely neo-institutionalist explanations. The article draws two conclusions. The first concerns the resilience of Italy's backwardness in this policy field. The second, a theoretical consideration, is that if institutions function as constraint generators as well as opportunity generators for actors, agency dynamics are crucial in order to fully understand the timing and specific contents of institutional change.