Explaining political turnarounds on minimum wages : the Italian case in a comparative perspective

While the majority of OECD countries have a national minimum wage, a minority relies on collective bargaining as a functionally equivalent alternative model. Some countries have recently changed model or started discussing it. We ask when and why advanced capitalist democracies make such change, testing functionalist, power resource and institutional explanations. The article looks at the cases of UK and Germany (which introduced a national minimum wage) and Italy (which have started discussing it), against the background of Sweden, which, like other countries, refuse to do so. In doing so, we identify some conditions and contributing factors that allow to better understand how institutional legacies affect shifts in regulatory approaches to wage setting, and draw some implications for labour market policies, especially in the particularly open Italian case