Recentralisation in welfare? Measuring and comparing territorial governance change in Spain

Decentralisation was one of the more visible changes in Western welfare states from the 1970s to the 2000s and was viewed by some as an unstoppable trend. However, during the Great Recession, governmental responses to certain policy problems have called into question the decentralisation process through a series of recentralising changes in territorial governance in several multilevel systems. This article seeks to understand whether and how the territorial governance of the Welfare State has experienced a process of recentralisation by identifying and measuring three of its dimensions in the Spanish case. This is done by constructing an index of Social Policy Recentralisation (SPREI) and applying it to the healthcare and long-term care policies in Spain between 2010 and 2016. We observe a recentralisation process in the policies analysed with a differentiated scope and intensity in the different dimensions reflected in the proposed index.