ABSTRACT
The analysis so far was a historical comparison between Italy and Germany. We traced the influence that the two very different party systems in these countries had on the segmentation of unemployment benefits since the Second World War. We focused on the number of parties as well as their positioning in political space. In the post-war decades of welfare expansion the unemployment benefit systems in both states took very different paths. We have shown in Chapter 7 that this divergence can be explained to a large extent by the different party systems. Also for the phase of welfare restructuring we have seen that reforms were affected by party competition and the configuration of party systems.
