Mémoire
| Résumé : | This dissertation aims to identify how welfare chauvinism influenced social policies reforms from 2010 to 2020 in Italy and the Netherlands. During the analysis has been considered the end of the social activism of the Court of Justice of the European Union since 1990s, as well as the rise of new right-wing populist parties in Western politics. The welfare agendas of these parties are based on the theories of welfare chauvinism, welfare populism and nativism. Their electoral success is a direct consequence of creating new structural conflicts and cleavages that emerged in Western European countries since the introduction of austerity measures in 2010 and the refugee crisis of 2015. The creation of new welfare coalition configurations allowed new right-wing parties to increase their electoral success and become key national politics players. However, in Italy, the Lega Nord (LN) and in the Netherlands the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) did not manage to translate into law a concrete shift and restriction of welfare state benefits entitlements. Although they both based their electoral programmes on the notion of welfare chauvinism, distinguishing between “us” and “them”, between the natives who deserve the benefits and the “others” who underserve any kind of social assistance, this never concretely happened in none of the two countries. After all, it has been identified a shift in both parties from “welfare exclusion” toward a new approach of “welfare favouritism” and “welfare conditionality”. It has been registered a tendency to give priority and preferential treatment to the “natives” in the allocation of social services, referring to eligibility as something conditional on minimal period of residence and cultural assimilation. |
