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I. HOUSING: SYSTEMS, WELFARE AND MOBILITY

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JUDITH ALLEN HOUSING AND WELFARE REGIMES IN SOUTHERN EUROPE

The question of whether there is a separate, specifically southern welfare regime has been vigorously debated since the publication of Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare in 1990. The answers to this question fall, broadly, into two camps. In the first camp, there are those who focus very tightly on the nature of the formal income maintenance systems in southern Europe (as does Esping-Andersen) and conclude that the southern European countries should fall within his conservative/corporatist grouping..Those in the second camp argue that the outcomes associated with income maintenance systems can only be understood within a broader societal context, and so conclude that there is a separate southern welfare system within which a corporatist-conservative income maintenance system has distinctive effects.

The main purpose of this paper is to develop and use Esping-Andersen’s concept of welfare regimes in order to analyse the nature of housing provision systems in southern Europe (Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece). The analysis proceeds in four broad steps. First, it identifies those features of the housing systems in southern Europe which appear to distinguish them from northern Europe. Thus, the scope of the comparison is more restricted than, and slightly different from Esping-Andersen’s, which covered 18 of the OECD countries, but only included Italy, among the southern countries, within his analysis. The second step requires refashioning Esping-Andersen’s approach into a usable tool for this purpose, primarily by disentangling his theoretical analysis and his empirical analysis, in order to use it as an ideal-typical construct rather than a method of categorising countries. The third step reviews some of the ways that Esping-Andersen’s concept of welfare regimes has been applied to housing. The fourth step draws on the debate over southern welfare regimes in order to identify three contextual factors which shape the role of corporatist income maintenance systems in southern Europe and concludes with some remarks about the role of housing policy and provision systems within this context1.

1 This paper articulates some of the results of a collective project analysing housing in southern Europe. The fruits of the whole project can be found in J Allen, J Barlow, J Leal, T Maloutas and L Padovani (2004ff) Housing and Welfare in Southern Europe, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Some early work was presented to CIB W069 at its Wrexham meeting in 2000.

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CHARACTERISTICS OF HOUSING IN SOUTHERN EUROPE

The housing systems of the four southern countries can be distinguished from the other western European housing systems in four ways. First, in terms of tenure, they are characterised by very high levels of owner occupation and relatively low levels of social housing. These characteristics are shown in Tables 1 and 2. In all four countries, strong rent control systems have also led to a rapid decline of the private rented sector.

Table 1: Housing tenure, European Union, circa 2000

Country Owner occupied

Social rented

Private rented Other

Spain (98) 82 1 10 7 Greece (90) 78 0 22 0 Italy (98) 69 5 11 15 Portugal (98) 64 3 25 8 Ireland (98) 78 9 16 3 Belgium (00) 74 7 16 3 Luxembourg (95) 70 3 27 0 United Kingdom (01) 69 22 9 0 Finland (97) 60 14 16 10 Austria (98) 56 21 20 3 France (96) 54 17 21 8 Netherlands (00) 53 36 11 0 Denmark (00) 51 19 26 4 Germany (98) 43 7 50 0 Sweden (90) 41 27 13 19

Source: Fribourg 2002, p 3; for Greece, data is from Haffner 1998, p 46 The year to which the data refer is in parentheses against the name of the country.

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Table 2: Social housing units per 1000 inhabitants, European Union countries, circa 2000

Country Units per 1000 inhabitants

Greece 0 Spain 3 Luxembourg 9 Portugal 12 Italy 16 Belgium 26 Ireland 27 Germany (former 30 Finland 48 France 71 United Kingdom 92 Austria 94 Denmark 94 Sweden 105 Netherlands 149

Source: Fribourg 2002, p 7

Second, there are a very high levels of secondary housing. Secondary housing is a complex phenomenon, which arises in several different ways: it includes purpose built second homes as well as second homes arising out of massive and relatively recent internal rural to urban migration. It also includes touristic development and second homes belonging to households living outside the countries, both migrant labour intending to return home and households from northern Europe who have invested in retirement homes in the south. Such a complex phenomenon is not easily measured. Figure 1 shows the pattern of recent urbanisation in southern Europe, and Tables 3 and 4 give what information is available about the scale of secondary housing.

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Figure 1: Urbanisation in southern and northern Europe, 1950-2000 Source: United Nations (2002) World Urbanization Prospects: The 2001

Revision, New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division

Table 3: Distribution of second homes in Europe, circa 1991

Category EU15 EU15 without

southern Europe

Southern Europe*

Primary homes 85.0 90.7 73.5 Empty 5.9 4.2 9.2

Second homes 8.0 3.6 16.9 Others 1.1 1.5 0.2 Total 100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: Eurostat *Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain.

Table 4: Distribution of second homes in southern European countries, circa 1991

Category Greece Spain Italy Portugal Primary homes 66.1 68.1 78.8 73.0 Empty na 14.4 7.2 10.5 Second homes na 17.0 13.9 15.8 Vacant 33.6 31.3 21.1 28.3 Others 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.7

Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 Source: Eurostat

Urban population, southern and northern Europe, 1950-2000

020406080

100

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Per c

ent o

f tot

al

popu

latio

n GreeceItalyPortugalSpainEU 11

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Secondary housing is also strongly related to the third distinctive characteristic of housing systems in southern Europe, which is the significance of family – in its widest sense – in housing provision and access. Tables 5, 6 and 7 illustrate some aspects of the differences between southern and northern Europe.

Table 5: Family households as a percentage of all households,

Southern Europe and EU12, 1995

Country Family households as % of all households

Portugal 83.7 Spain 83.1 Greece 78.8 Italy 76.3 EU12 70.3

Source: Eurostat 1996, p 44

Table 6: Average age when more than half of young people are living in their own homes, selected European countries, 1998

Country Females Males Italy 27.1 29.7 Spain 26.6 28.4 Greece 22.9 28.2 Portugal 25.2 28.0 France 22.2 24.1 Germany 21.6 24.8 UK 21.2 23.5 Netherlands 21.2 23.3 Ireland 25.2 26.3 Denmark 20.3 21.4

Source: European Community Housing Panel, adapted from Iacouvou (2000)

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Table 7: Gross divorce rates in European Union countries, 1995

Country Divorces per 1000 inhabitants

Italy 0.5 Spain 0.8 Greece 1.1 Portugal 1.2 Luxembourg 1.8 France 2.0 Germany 2.1 Netherlands 2.2 Austria 2.3 Finland 2.5 Sweden 2.6 Denmark 2.7 United Kingdom 2.9 Belgium 3.5

Source: Eurostat, Statistiques en bref, 1997

The fourth characteristic which distinguishes the housing systems of southern Europe is the strong role played by self-promotion and self-provision in ensuring access to housing for newly forming households and for households who have migrated from rural areas. The extent of illegal provision is related to the scale of self-provision, but not all self-provision is illegal. Illegal provision is more difficult to measure quantitatively, but has been widespread particularly in southern Italy, Greece and Portugal. It has been much less common in Spain because the construction industry there has been very strongly shaped by a corporatist settlement during the Franco years, based on large contracting firms and a strong town planning system. (There are some indicators that the Portuguese system of provision is beginning to shift towards a more Spanish model, based on large scale contracting and a strong mortgage finance system.)

The implication of these characteristics of the housing systems is that the role of the state in the housing system is much less about direct provision, and more about creating the conditions under which provision by non-state agents is facilitated.

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COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: NORTH VERSUS SOUTH?

Are the housing systems in the four southern countries different in some fundamental way from those in the northern European countries? Or are the differences outlined above simply a statistical artefact, reflecting the late economic development of the southern countries? Does it make sense to speak of a single northern European housing system?

The key problem is to fashion a tool for answering these questions which goes beyond empirical generalisations about housing systems. In fact, on any reasonably wide range of indicators, it would be difficult to argue that there is a distinctive southern system of housing. If there is a “separate” or “distinctive” southern system, then the answer must lie in the role that housing plays in wider societal structures and processes.

One way of answering this question is to build on work done in social policy. There have been two major quantitatively based cross-national comparative studies in social policy, one by Esping-Andersen (1990) and the other by Castles (1998). Both tell the same general story: beyond a certain level of economic development in a country, politics matters in shaping the nature of their social security systems. Castles starts with an a priori division of countries into “families of nations”, and tests the robustness of this division. Esping-Andersen starts by analysing the broad political philosophies which have informed the development of welfare states and uses these to devise a set of indicators for income maintenance programmes in order to divide countries into different groupings.

Castle’s work tends to be more theoretically eclectic, partly determined by his set of indicator variables, picked on the basis of their availability for all the countries within his data set for three points in time since the mid-1970s. He includes Spain, Greece and Portugal within his analysis, and starts by assuming that they form a separate Mediterranean “family of nations”. He also includes a specific analysis of housing policy in a section which also analyses policies on fertility and divorce. The only conclusion which can be drawn from these analyses is that policies which impinge on “personal life” follow a different dynamic than mainstream social security, health and education policies. Another way to look at this conclusion is to interpret it as an indicator of the significance of family processes in shaping the welfare of households.

Esping-Andersen’s procedure leads to a sharper and more theoretically informed analytical tool, but needs to be adapted in three ways to make it useful for looking at housing in southern Europe. First, the effects of reducing its scope to Europe, plus including Spain, Portugal and Greece, need to be explored. Second, it needs to be adapted to looking at housing systems rather

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than income maintenance systems, and third, it needs to be extended to include consideration of the role of the family.

The concept of welfare regimes is based on three questions:

− To what extent does the system of provision contribute to the decommodification of labour, that is, protect the labourer from the operation of the labour market?

− In what ways does the system of provision interact with systems of social stratification? And, in particular, are state workers privileged within the system of provision?

− How are state and market provision mixed within welfare state programmes?

Decommodification is measured on a uni-dimensional scale2. The stratification question leads to a three way categorisation between conservative (reinforcing existing hierarchies), liberal (determined by the market) and socialist (defined as a levelling up egalitarianism). His analysis of programme design also leads to a three way categorisation: residualist (dominated by market provision), corporatist state-dominated (previous occupational status is the key element in pension provision) and universalistic state-dominated (social security schemes are the most important form of provision).

The historical and theoretical analysis, thus, leads to three ideal typical welfare regimes:

− Low decommodification, liberal, residualist

− Medium decommodification, conservative, corporatist

− High decommodification, socialist, universalistic

The next step in Esping-Andersen’s analysis was to use each of the dimensions (decommodification, stratification and programme design) to categorise each of the countries in his data set. The results of his analysis are set out in Table 8 below.

2 In fact, the analysis is more complex, since the empirical analysis is based on the construction of complex indices around each of these three questions. The discussion here focuses on the theoretical logic.

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Table 8: Classification of countries in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism Decommodification Stratification Programme design Low Liberal Residualist Australia United States New Zealand Canada Ireland United Kingdom

Australia Canada Japan Switzerland United States

Australia Canada Switzerland United States

Medium Conservatism Corporatist Italy Japan France Germany Finland Switzerland

Austria Belgium France Germany Italy

Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Japan Finland

High Socialism Universalistic Austria Belgium Netherlands Denmark Norway Sweden

Denmark Finland Netherlands Norway Sweden

New Zealand Norway Sweden Denmark Netherlands

What this effectively does is elide the distinction between the ideal typical concept of welfare regimes and the set of countries for which he has data. The procedure is somewhat Procrustean, in that some countries drop out of sight altogether. Furthermore, all the European countries (except Switzerland) become categorised as either corporatist or social democratic, which may obscure important differences among them3.

To take the analysis one step further, it is possible to identify archetypal countries within the table above. These are shown in table 9, which summarises the whole of the analysis.

3 Esping-Andersen was not particularly systematic about labelling his welfare regimes, but these are the labels which have come to be used.

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Table 9: Regime types and archetypal countries in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

Regime type Level of decommodification: Stratification principle: Programme design principle:

Liberal Low Liberal Residualist

Conservative Medium Conservative Corporatist

Social democratic High Socialist Universalistic

Core countries

Australia Canada United States

France Germany Italy

Norway Sweden

An alternative approach, supported by a more critical look at how Esping-Andersen uses his data, would be to consider the notion of welfare regimes as ideal-typical constructs and use them to measure the position of specific countries with respect to each of the major dimensions (decommodification, stratification and programme design). This work is reported more fully in Allen, et al (2004ff). The key points are that the decommodification scale has four natural breaks in it yielding five groups of countries rather than the three groups Esping-Andersen identifies, and that the procedure preserves the multi-dimensionality of the criteria behind the stratification and programme design components of the idea of welfare regimes. The results of this type of analysis are set out in Figure 2. Two points are of particular interest. First, only one country emerges as archetypal, which is Sweden. Second, the position of Italy becomes quite mixed, exhibiting low decommodification, a system which is in tension between liberal and conservative approaches to stratification, and a programme design for pensions which is both strongly etatist (not shown on the diagram) and suspended between corporatist and universalist approaches.

Italy can be used as a kind of proxy for the other three southern countries. Esping-Andersen classified it as a continental-corporatist regime, and subsequent analyses of the other three countries confirm this classification (Guillen and Alvarez 2001, Katrougalos 1996, Guibentif 1996, Petmesidou 1991) as long as the definition of welfare regimes which is used is highly focused on income maintenance programmes.

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Australia LIBERAL RESIDUALISTUnited States United States CanadaNew Zealand

AustraliaCanada United StatesIreland SwitzerlandUnited Kingdom Japan DenmarkItaly Netherlands

Ireland United KingdomJapan Netherlands Belgium GermanyFrance CanadaGermany United Kingdom CORPORATISTFinland Australia FranceSwitzerland Switzerland

FinlandAustria AustriaBelgium ItalyNetherlands

SwedenDenmark NorwayNorway Sweden New ZealandSweden SOCIALIST UNIVERSALIST

Figure 2Reanalysing existing welfare states using welfare state regimes as an ideal typical c

NOTE: The direction of the horizontal axis in the analysis of pension programme design has been reversed on this diagram as compared to figure 4.3

PROGRAMME DESIGN

VER

Y H

IGH

CO

NSE

RV

ATI

VE

DECOMMODIFICATION STRATIFICATION

MED

IUM

LOW

VER

Y LO

WH

IGH

Japan France Italy Austria

New Zealand Belgium Norway Finland Ireland

Netherland Canada United Kingdom Australia Switzerland

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The central issue in the “separate southern welfare regime” debate is summarised by Esping-Andersen as:

A perverted use of welfare programmes and public bureaucracies may define the character of a polity, but it is difficult to see how it defines a welfare regime unless the entire system was from the very beginning specifically designed for the purpose of clientelism rather than social protection (1999, 90).

What the debate over a separate southern welfare regime does, in general, is emphasise the extent to which the outcomes of welfare regimes are context dependent, that is, depend on wider societal systems for the distribution of welfare among households. In addition, those who argue for a separate southern welfare regime stress not only clientelism, but also the role of the extended southern family in guaranteeing the welfare of its members in a strongly dualistic labour market. Before talking about each of these factors in more detail, it is useful to review how Esping-Andersen’s work has been used in the housing literature.

EXTENDING THE CONCEPT OF WELFARE REGIMES TO ANALYSING HOUSING

Very little work in housing has been strongly based on Esping-Andersen’s analysis. However, four pieces of work can be examined. Harloe (1995) generally rejects Esping-Andersen’s approach for his purposes, but includes a useful discussion of decommodification. He proposes using the proportion of state or state-sponsored housing as a measure of the decommodification of housing. This raises a number of wider questions: What is the relationship between the decommodification of housing and the decommodification of labour? Is tenure the best way to define decommodified housing provision? What are we to make of about other forms of provision (eg self provision, family based provision) which may also protect labour from the unfettered operation of the labour market? Do these forms of provision fit into a concept of decommodification, or do we need some other concept to express the extent to which family, rather than state, protects labour? Finally, is a measure of the decommodification of housing which is based on social sector provision entirely adequate to use in systems which are dominated by owner occupation?

Barlow and Duncan (1994) use Esping-Andersen’s work more systematically to explore decommodification within structures of housing provision, roughly defined as ways of limiting profits in the production process. They assume that there is a separate southern welfare regime including Greece, Portugal and Spain, and, following Liebfried (1992), they label it as “rudimentary”.

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Their approach is to identify a “housing provision chain” with four links: promotion, production, land supply and consumption. They develop a set of measures for assessing the state-market mix within promotion, production and land supply. They ignore the consumption link because their primary interest in is production. Their analysis identifies two core groups of countries within Europe. One is a corporatist grouping of Austria, (West) Germany and Belgium. The other is a southern group, which includes Portugal, Greece and Italy, but not Spain, which appears to have a very different system of housing provision than the other three southern countries. Their analysis suggests that the categorisation of countries by welfare regimes is strongly dependent on the welfare programme under consideration. Their detailed analysis shows how the concept of tenure is woven through housing provision systems and is, thus, too complex to use within a welfare regime analysis (cf Jaffe 1989). If decommodification is identified with limited profits in either the consumption or production of housing, the question is whether limiting profits does any more than simply allow labourers to work for lower wages. This, in turn, raises the question of whether a more apt definition of decommodification in relationship to housing should be based on the extent to which a labourer can withdraw from the labour market because the terms on which s/he occupiers housing are relatively secure.

Arbaci (2001) opens up some of the issues surrounding the stratification component of welfare regimes in relationship to housing, in the context of analysing the spatial distribution of disprivileged minority ethnic groups in several European cities. Building on Barlow and Duncan, she argues that scale of housing production can be used to account for a fine or coarse grained pattern of spatial segregation, but this must be coupled with analysing the conditions of access to housing. She extends Kemeny’s concept of unitary and dualist rented systems to the owner occupied sector by identifying self-provided, informal and/or illegal housing as the counterpart of social rented housing within a dualist rental system. Thus, three key variables related to the provision of new housing govern the pattern of spatial insertion of poorer ethnic groups into cities: scale of new building (closely linked to control of land supply and the balance between productivity and development gains in the building industry), tenure neutrality or dualism governing access within and across tenures, and promotion forms (especially the significance of self-promotion). Three additional variables are required to look at spatial distribution across the entire stock of housing: range of quality standards, reinvestment in existing stock and the extent to which a vertical pattern of social segregation within multi-family buildings.

Hoekstra (2002) takes a more thoroughgoing approach to revising Esping-Andersen’s work for use in analysing housing. He examines changes in the Dutch housing system between the 1980s and 1990s. His definition of

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decommodification explicitly links housing and the labour market as being “the extent to which households can provide their own housing, independent of the income they acquire on the labour market” (Hoekstra 2002, 60) which he measures by scale of subsidy and price regulation. He identifies stratification in general terms with the allocation of housing, that is, which groups have privileged access to what parts of the housing stock. However, his discussion of what we have labelled programme design “imports” the family to identify the mix between state, market and family in the organisation of the production of newly built dwellings. He then develops specific criteria for identifying the housing systems that would be associated with social democratic, corporatist and liberal welfare regimes. On this basis he argues that the Dutch housing system has become less social democratic and more corporatist as a consequence of the policy changes in the early 1990s. He concludes, however, that the definition of corporatism in Esping-Andersen’s work, which is concerned with the mix of actors in specific welfare programmes, needs elaborating in more detail because there are different forms of corporatist power sharing arrangements. This appears to elide two different meanings of the word “corporatism”, one which is about political structures and one which is about programmes of provision.

These four studies illustrate a number of points about using the concept of welfare regimes to analyse housing. Leaving aside the (formidable) technical issues of defining specific indicators and data availability, they raise three wider questions. First, the debate over whether the main evaluative criterion is the decommodification of labour or the decommodification of housing is fundamental. Does the decommodification of housing contribute to the commodification or decommodification of labour? This question poses two challenges. One is to look more closely at the role played by the decommodification of housing in different types of economic transition. Parts of northern Europe have been characterised by a transition from agricultural to industrialised, to (de-industrialised) tertiary economies, while southern Europe is characterised by a transition from agricultural to tertiary. The other challenge is to define the decommodification of housing in a way which is applicable across both northern and southern countries, and which takes account not only of the production of housing, but also of its stock characteristics. Second, it is important to develop a set of concepts which can deal with the family as an active agent in housing, distinguishing between family-as-occupier (household) and the family as a social institution, a much wider affective network, which may play an active role in accessing housing for its member households, in the light of changing labour market structures as a consequence of economic transition. The third broad issue raised by the housing studies is how to set the analysis within the context of different types of political structures or polities and the characteristic range of housing policy

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instruments they may use. In other words, a more institutionally grounded concept of the state is needed than is used in Esping-Andersen’s work.

WELFARE REGIMES, WELFARE STATES AND WELFARE SYSTEMS?

Substantively, the dynamics driving housing systems in southern Europe appear to be different from those in northern Europe, and the dynamics driving housing systems appear to be different from those driving social security or income maintenance policies.

At this point it is useful to distinguish between welfare systems, welfare regimes and welfare states.

The notion of welfare systems is designed to point to configurations of the broad social institutions which deliver welfare to households or individuals: family, market and state (Abrahamson 1992, Kolberg and Uusitalo 1992, Pereirinha 1996, Alexander 1998). In Kolberg and Uusitalo’s formulation, the idea is useful for looking at Parsonian differentiation and de-differentiation at a structural level, but it can be extended to looking at the existence of pre-differentiated institutional structures if the concept of Parsonian differentiation is linked to fordist industrialisation processes. They argue that the modern institutions which need to be examined are: family, labour market and welfare state. These institutions are mutually dependent and linked into a single, larger institutional complex. The configuration of the larger complex, thus, helps to explain specific institutional forms.

Welfare systems

Welfare regimes

Welfare states

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The notion of welfare states refers to existing states and the specific systems they have developed for supporting the welfare of families, households and individuals. There is a longstanding argument about whether housing is an element of “the welfare state” (cf Hoekstra 2003 for a concise statement of this debate), but given the significance of shelter in the welfare of families, households and individuals, there is an argument for including it as a welfare activity of states, at least. The debate arises because the methods of delivery adopted by states are diverse and multifarious: direct provision, regulation of private or independent social provision, provision of essential complementary goods such as urban infrastructure, and symbolic interventions, non-interventions and non-implementation of existing policy.

The diagram above is drawn to indicate that the concept of welfare regimes was designed as a way of linking broad contextual figurations with the messiness of the reality of a wide variety of income maintenance systems. Reviewing the debates over the existence of a separate southern welfare regime and over how the concept of welfare regimes might be applied to housing suggests that the concept of welfare regimes is founded on a number of hidden assumptions about the figuration of the welfare systems on which it rests. Three aspects of this figuration in southern Europe emerge as worthy of examination: the nature of the polity and the role of clientelism, the nature of the labour market, and the role of the family.

NORTH-CENTRIC ASSUMPTIONS? SOUTHERN PRACTICES?

The capacity of the state and clientelism

The role of the state is distinctive in several ways in the southern European countries. In Ferrera’s phrase, there is a “double deficit of stateness”. On the one hand, there is less direct provision by the state, and on the other hand, state welfare institutions are vulnerable to partisan pressure and manipulation. “Welfare rights are not embedded in an open, universalistic political culture and a solid, Weberian state impartial in the administration of its own rules” (Ferrera 1996, 29). The combination of weak, unprotected sectors in the labour market and a “soft” state provides fertile ground for “a clientelistic market, in which state transfers to supplement inadequate work incomes are exchanged for party support, often through the mediation of trade unions, at the individual level” (Ferrera 1996, 25).

Although specific practices vary immensely, clientelism is essentially an exchange of services provided by the state in return for support for political parties (cf Ferrera 1996, Petmesidou 1991, Petmesidou and Tsoulovis 1994, Katrougalos 1996 for specific descriptions). It distributes services according to a particularistic and/or personalised logic rather than the depersonalised,

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universalistic logic associated with a professionalised Weberian bureaucracy in a modernist welfare state. It is most likely to emerge when processes of social change lag behind political modernisation, and can co-exist with the formal institutions of a democratic state (Roniger 1998, Pérez-Diaz 1998).

The origins of clientelism lie in traditions of civil administration which pre-date the transition to democracy in the southern countries, and which were transposed into the new institutional structures (Mény and Rhodes 1997). Clientelism lingers longest where needs are high relative to available resources (Fargion 1996) and where legislation creates administrative instruments allowing for great discretion or which are opaque (Katrougalos 1996). The natural habitat of clientelism is where “organisational deficiencies, overstaffing and lack of work incentives for public employees (opportunities for second jobs in the informal economy, party political and other non-meritocratic criteria for appointment and promotion) contribute to poor provision of services and lack of any systematic policy” (Petmesidou 1991, 39-40).

Most commonly, political parties articulate the relationship between client and bureaucracy. The specific relationships can range from localised systems of clientelism (in southern Italy and some regions of Spain) through to the thoroughgoing statist spoils system in Greece. The vertical aggregation of interests through parties, linked with clientelistic practices, tends to inhibit the development of organisations in civil society which can aggregate interests horizontally (Alexander 1998). However, the absence of horizontal interest aggregation is also related to other factors. One is class structure. For example, in Greece and Italy, the middle classes are dominated by petty traders and self-employed persons, and so do not represent a strong base for horizontal organisation (Petmesidou 1991, Stille 2003). It is likely, as well, that some rural agricultural social structures inhibit the formation of civil society organisations. More generally, high inequality structures inhibit horizontal organisation (Reis 1998). In addition, within a system characterised by Catholic and Orthodox subsidiarity, a wide variety of civil society organisations can exist, often sponsored by the Church itself, which may inhibit the formation of mass horizontal organisations (Hespanha et al 1997).

Four aspects of clientelism need to be considered in assessing its impact on the welfare of households. First, there is the direct delivery of services. In a clientelistic system, access to social welfare becomes a unit of exchange between political and social groups, including trade unions, especially at the local level (Martin 1996). The particularistic logic of clientelist systems makes it difficult to predict their distributive effects, but it is clear that in some systems, such as the statist spoils system in Greece, the effects will be more marked and deeply institutionalised than elsewhere. Second, clientelism is set within social systems which emphasise primary solidarities among kin and neighbours, and

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these solidarities widen access to clientelistic patronage to meet particularistic needs for specific services. The system allows households to derive revenue through access to the state and means that traditional support networks offer an alternative to widening the range and scope of welfare state policies (Katrougalos 1996). At the same time, however, this reinforces patriarchal power relations within families because access is mediated through the male heads of families. Third, clientelism operates more easily in the context of an informal economy. Universalistic distributive policies are difficult to implement if incomes (and tax liabilities) cannot be accurately assessed and verified. The informal economy also spans the boundaries between the public and private sectors. Fourth, the welfare effects of state employment should not be underestimated. While this is quite different from the Scandinavian model of welfare state employment, nevertheless state employment is sought after, either for access to other benefits in a clientelistic system or because it anchors families in the guaranteed sector (Katrougalos 1996).

There is a two-way relationship between clientelism and the types of policies which can be formulated and implemented. Excessively complex policies, policies which depend strongly on administrative discretion, and policies which require working across the boundary between the public and private sectors provide opportunities for clientelism. But clientelism can also shape policy. The statist spoils system in Greece promotes fragmented corporatist policy approaches and incremental change (Katrougalos 1996). It also inhibits the development of horizontal interest aggregation which limits the approaches which can be taken to regulating urban development (Petmesidou and Tsoulouvis 1994). Certainly the informal and illegal settlements found in many parts of southern Europe attest to a clientelistic absence of policy or failure to implement land use policies.

In the absence of systematic research, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about how widespread clientelism is (Guillen and Alvarez 2001). Either some practices go unremarked because they are regarded as normal and proper (Mény and Rhodes 1997), or the wide variety of practices which have been documented suggest that clientelism is a leopard which changes its spots as political systems change.

The general political conditions within which civil administration is set, that is, a highly party politicised formal democracy, the absence of strong horizontal interest aggregation, and a weakly professionalised pre-modern bureaucracy, may be more important in shaping housing practices and policy than the specific forms of clientelism which vary over time and from place to place, even within the same country. Nevertheless, specific forms of clientelism also have a very strong impact on the way housing is provided in specific localities and regions.

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Dualistic labour markets

There is a strong connection between corporatist welfare systems and dualistic labour markets. The insider-outsider distinction is reinforced by the high levels of contributions required to finance social insurance schemes yielding high income replacement levels as well as regulatory biases against all but the standard adult male breadwinner worker. Within corporatist systems, there is a vicious circle which sustains the dualistic labour market. Both employers and employees have strong incentives to use informal employment relationships which do not require the payment of social contributions. Consequently, atypical and often black market activity provide the main strategy for those locked out of the core sectors (Esping-Andersen 1996).

Nevertheless, characterising the labour markets in southern Europe as dualistic is oversimplified. An important segment of these labour markets, state sector employment, is not formal employment in the same way as in fordist manufacturing industry. In a “not very Weberian state” coupled with a large informal sector, multiple employment by state employees is common (Ferrera 1998). The poor pay of civil servants, compared with the private sector, especially in Italy and Greece, contributes to their participation in the underground economy (Castles and Ferrera 1996). In Greece, the state is the “employer of first resort”, especially in rural areas (Katrougalos 1996) and employment by state and public corporations constitutes half the so-called formal sector (Petmesidou 1991).

The picture of the informal sector is also more complex than a simple dualistic labour market model suggests. In Spain, a four-cornered society is created by different job/income and welfare opportunities: protected core workers, temporary and irregular workers, an underground sector, and ex- and unemployed workers (Ferrera 1996). A segmented rather than dualistic labour market model helps to account for changes in employment patterns in agricultural areas as well (Pereirinha 1996).

Four general phenomena contribute to structuring the informal employment sector. The first is multiple employment. This is not confined to poorly paid civil servants. In the rural areas in northern Portugal, 80 per cent of farmers work part time in agriculture, 47.5 per cent at less than half time (Pereirinha 1996). Self-employment favours multiple employment in both rural and urban areas in Greece, which has the lowest level of salaried workers and highest proportion of self-employed workers in the European Union (Symeonidou 1996). Multiple employment practices which span the formal and informal sectors protect workers during economic downturns, but also tend to fragment the middle and lower middle classes, inhibiting horizontal solidarity and demands for the expansion of welfare state programmes (Tsoukalas 1987,

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Petmesidou 1991). Second, the existence of a large black economy in all of the southern countries contributes to fragmentation and fluidity in the informal employment sector. Third, the structure of the social insurance programmes themselves promote particular forms of informal employment. Fifty per cent of early retired workers in Italy continue to work in the informal sector (Esping-Andersen 1996). Fourth, immigration affects how the informal labour market functions. Illegal foreigners have no social rights and are much more vulnerable to exploitation in the labour market (Katrougalos 1996). Greece and Portugal, in particular, have absorbed very large numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants, including returners from the former Soviet Union and the former Portuguese colonies.

In conclusion, the dualism in southern European labour markets, compared with the dual markets associated with the northern European corporatist welfare systems, runs alongside welfare states with exceptionally generous pension schemes in the formal sector and relatively scarce or non-existent provision in most other areas of welfare state activity. The strength of networks of primary solidarity embodied in family, kinship, and neighbourhood both compensate for this pattern of welfare state provision and facilitate the functioning of the informal employment sector.

The highly dualistic labour market creates strong biases in housing policy towards home ownership, both as an anchor of security for those outside the formal labour market and as a significant form of investment within the black economy (Castles and Ferrera 1996). In addition, self-provision and illegal provision also create flexibility in the pattern of payments for housing in circumstances in which income streams are uneven over time and unpredictable. In contrast, the financing of social rented housing requires either that the majority of tenants are in guaranteed sector employment or that the state shows a high level of willingness to subsidise such housing. Familialism

The persistence and significance of primary solidarities in the provision of social protection is "Based on personal connections, affective links, networks of exchange and sociability, bartering and a non-cash economy" (Martin 1996, 34: cf also Hespanha et al 1997). The network of social relationships between the extended family, kin and neighbourhood is an indispensable resource because it is a way of accessing other resources . For example, despite the failure of the Italian welfare state to provide any formal support for lone mothers, they are less likely to be poor than in Germany or the United Kingdom, because the Italian parentela operates as a clearinghouse mediating the relationship between a segmented labour market and a fragmented income maintenance system (Ruspini 2000). In Portugal, 50 per cent of the very long-term

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unemployed reported that their families were their source of support while only 12 per cent reported unemployment benefit as their main source of income (Pereirinha 1996). Kinship and social networks are more important for young people looking for jobs in both Italy and Spain than in the rest of Europe (Guerrero and Naldini 1996). The operation of the family is the main reason why poverty does not lead directly to social exclusion in southern Europe (Ruspini 2000, Katrougalos 1996). At the same time, family networks show a strong gender division of labour. Internal caring work is, in principle, women's work while external relations with the labour market are men's work (Symeonidou 1996).

Thus, the identification between household and family common in many housing studies is misleading in the context of southern Europe. The family in southern Europe cannot be understood as a self-contained unit. It is first and foremost a nexus of affectively significant networks extending through a wider kinship circle and into the neighbourhood and locality. Those who are outside these networks lose their access to significant social and economic resources.

Economic change also affects the role of the family. For example, rural to urban migration is one process associated with economic transition which has significant impacts on the family. The networked particularism of the southern family opened possibilities for diversifying and multiplying the welfare resources which rural to urban migrants could make available to their families (Hespanha et al 1997). But these effects seem to have also depended on the method of settlement in urban areas. In Portugal, social rented housing disrupts or attenuates many of these networking resources, while self-promoted and self-built clandestine housing helps to sustain them (Costa-Pinto 1998). The interaction between gender and labour markets is also important in understanding family strategies. As women enter the labour force in larger numbers, familial networks become more dependent on cash transfers as a substitute for women's unpaid labour in the family (González et al 2000).

Using a robust concept of family means that it cannot be easily fitted into the framework of an analysis which rests on modernist narratives of how economic growth and partisan politics shape welfare state policy, because the family is a way of re-distributing cash transfers and combining them with other resources in a particularistic rather than universalistic logic (Castles and Ferrera 1996). What is clear in southern Europe is that in the context of weak civil administration and segmented labour markets, family strategies are shaped as much by the pattern of resources available to them as the scale of those resources. The significance of structural economic change is that it alters the pattern of resources available to families. But if the family is accepted as an

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active agent in welfare systems, then welfare outcomes will reflect their actions as much as the actions of the state and market.

Ferrera (1996) argues that specific features of southern society affect the way corporatist income maintenance systems operate. It is vital for each family to have at least one member firmly anchored in garantismo, that is, the core formal sector. These workers are hyper-protected by the income maintenance system, while workers in the informal and irregular sectors, young people and the underemployed are under-protected. The southern family holds this together by acting as a clearing house between the labour market and the welfare system.

Housing plays a particular role in this kind of social system. The social policy mix in the four southern countries relies almost exclusively on pensions and social security transfers, has weak education and health sectors and very scarce personal social services while housing policy has focused on the promotion of home ownership. High home ownership sets up a political constituency among the young which is opposed to extending the welfare state through taxation, because it would interfere with saving for home ownership, and in favour of private pensions, health care and schools because this allows a more flexible pattern of expenditure.

The consequence of this policy mix is that the family plays a role which is as strong as the state’s in the delivery of housing to newly forming or mobile households. Securing housing for newly formed households becomes an extended family operation, mobilising the assets of both families of origin for young couples. In self-built housing in rural Portugal, for example, the most significant contributions come from close relatives: parents, siblings and close collateral kin. They meet diverse needs: providing living spaces, access to family plots of land, financial loans and labour. More distant relatives, neighbours and friends who are part of the family’s wider social network also help, but more occasionally, providing, for example, connections in municipal government, access to transport vehicles, masonry or electrical skills, arranging discounts with suppliers, lending money, etc. These arrangements place a heavy burden for a long period of time on family relationships (Hespanha et al 1997). The logic of these networks is one of mutual recognition and mutual help on a non-market basis and with a logic of reciprocity. Exchange is based on a particularistic logic, which rests on face to face interaction, and requires continual investment in primary social relationships.

The strength of the family is also reinforced by its role in providing either direct employment or the personal contacts which lead to employment, as well as by the gendered division of labour within it, which meets needs for caring which are not met in the formal welfare system. Cultural and economic modernisation are creating strains on these arrangements, and the main

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response is new strategies around the life cycle. Household formation is relatively low and fertility levels are below replacement rates. There are also severe problems for households who do not have at least one of their members anchored in the guaranteed sector. Even if they own their own (illegally built) home, such households are candidates for indigence and exclusion.

CONCLUSIONS

This paper has argued that some specific characteristics of housing systems in southern Europe can only be understood as a consequence of wider societal structures and processes. The overall argument has proceeded in two steps. The first step was to examine the way in which southern Europe and housing may, or may not, fit within Esping-Andersen’s concept of welfare regimes. The main purpose in using the concept of welfare regimes in this way was to identify a number of assumptions about the nature of welfare states which lie behind it. These assumptions were about the nature of civil administration in welfare states, issues related to the structure of the labour market and, in particular, the role of informal labour markets, and the role of the family in supplying welfare. The second step in the argument was begin to develop a more institutionally robust and grounded account of welfare delivery in southern Europe, and to begin to identify how the specific institutional configuration of welfare delivery shaped housing provision and policy.

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