Social Assistance Governance in Europe: Towards a Multilevel Perspective

In the last decades welfare policies in Europe underwent relevant changes affecting in particular two dimensions: a) the territorial organisation; b) the number of actors involved not only in managing and implementing, but also in regulating specific measures. The joint effect of both changes could be labelled as the “subsidiarisation of social policies”. The concept of subsidiarity captures well the synergies of the two processes of change, because it points to increasingly complex multi-level governance solutions to social policy reform needs. This chapter is intended to address these changes considering social assistance as our main focus and trying to answer two questions: Are the subsidiarisation trends homogenous both in terms of dynamics and outcome? What are the main similarities and differences across the different countries? In answering these questions, we will focus on the outcome of the subsidiarisation process and in particular on how the emerging governance arrangements influence the coping strategies of specific welfare users. Triangulating different methods, the main being the use of “vignettes”, i.e. typical cases submitted to street-level bureaucrats to acknowledge coping strategies in policy networks, we will make use of data collected within in the Rescaling project (120 vignettes based on hundreds of interviews). Rescaling is an international research project carried in 8 European countries: Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Poland. As a consequence, after introducing the rescaling argument in the field of social policy analysis, we will portray our subject both froma top-down perspective (policy analysis, secondary data, interviews with top level bureaucrats and stakeholds) and from a bottom-up perspective (focussed, vignette-based interviews with street-level bureaucrats) that allows to understand actual practices and the influence of changing organizational profiles on similar coping cases throughout Europe. The results show some consistency with the well-known welfare models, but also unexpected convergence and divergence paths based on territorial coordination challenges.