PROTECTING THE LONG-TERM UNEMPLOYED

Long-term unemployment (LTU) affects the Spanish labour market to a broader extent than those of other European Union members. This article analyses the choices made within the Spanish welfare state in order to protect the long-term unemployed. Indeed, a significant policy shift entailing redefinition of targets and incentives may be ascertained over the past twenty years. The article aims to explain why such a shift was possible by using a neoinsitutionalist theoretical perspective. After discussing the neo-insitutionalist approach to the study of labour markets, the article considers the evolution of LTU in a comparative perspective as well as the characteristics of the longterm unemployed in Spain, who present peculiar characteristics in terms of sex and age. It then assesses the evolution of labour market policies, i.e. to analyse the policy reform process by taking into account the perceptions and positions of the different actors involved. The article concludes that policy legacies and path dependency (i.e. reliance on passive protection) are indeed hard to overcome, even in the case of a national state where the problem of long-term unemployment is of crucial importance. Thus a major change in ‘shared meanings’ among policy-actors was needed for success in the adoption (and adaptation) of new policy paradigms in Spain. Furthermore, the impact of new policies on the reduction of LTU has been limited, and different groups of long-term unemployed have profited unevenly from them.