Persistent structures, uneven policies. The politics of enforcement and forbearance towards informal employment in Italy

Different political actors in power display divergent policy orientations towards informal employment, alternating between enforcement and forbearance, despite its high political and economic costs. Existing accounts of informalisation are unable to make sense of this policy variation. Building on the literature on the politics of forbearance, we argue that whilst employment informalisation, as a de facto liberalisation of employment relations, sustains economic accumulation in several sectors, it also responds to specific electoral-political logics. The political weight of economic groups whose accumulation strategies benefit from utilising informal employment stimies enforcement efforts and favours forbearance. We illustrate our argument by analysing variation in the policy agendas towards informal employment implemented by partisan governments in Italy between 1990 and 2019 in light of the composition of their electorates. We show that, despite persistent structural constraints, the weight of "informality beneficiaries on the side of capital" in the support bases of partisan governments shapes their policy approach towards employment informality. The greater the political weight of informality beneficiaries, the more pronounced is the policy emphasis towards de facto forbearance and «symbolic» enforcement efforts that leave the structural causes of informal employment untouched.