Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellow, 2005-2006

Sara Watson, Political Science: Party Incorporation Strategies and the Politics of Social Protection in Post-Authoritarian Spain and Portugal. In the mid-1970s, Spain and Portugal emerged from long periods of authoritarian rule and began the task of constructing democratic polities and the institutions of modern welfare capitalism, industrial relations systems, and welfare states. Both countries faced a particularly daunting economic task: the management of simultaneous deruralization and deindustrialization in the context of labor supply explosions and the global economic slowdown associated with the oil shocks of the early 1970s. Facing a similar challenge, the two countries adopted strikingly different strategies for regulating their labor markets. Today, Portugal and Spain demonstrate two ways of playing out Polanyi's "double movement": Portugal relies less on protection, leaving workers more exposed to the market. Spain, in contrast, relies more on protection, and buffers its citizens from the market.  This dissertation asks, why did two similarly poor, semi-peripheral agrarian economies undergoing processes of democratization develop such different models of welfare capitalism? The argument offered here links the different models of welfare capitalism in Spain and Portugal to the different strategies adopted by governing parties for dealing with the Communist labor movement. The empirical chapters of the dissertation describe the character of political competition in the transition period, how these dynamics shaped strategies for containing the far left, and how this shaped the unfolding of welfare capitalisms in the two countries.