Social Capital and Civic Culture in Italy

This chapter defines the concept of social capital adopted throughout the volume and situates it within the long-standing Italian debate on civic culture. Building on Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti’s (Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, 1993), social capital is conceived as a moral and value-related collective resource that binds individuals to a wider community through a shared sense of civic duty and responsibility. The chapter retraces the Italian research traditions that have shaped the study of civic culture and social capital. It discusses the enduring influence of Banfield’s notion of amoral familism (1958), the seminal contribution of Almond and Verba’s (The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, Little, Brown, 1963), and later studies on territorial political subcultures and subnational differences in political, economic and civic structures that led to the idea of three, four, or even five “Italies” (Bagnasco, Tre Italie: La problematica territoriale dello sviluppo italiano, Il Mulino, 1977; Caciagli, Polis 3: 429–457, 1988; Cartocci, Polis: ricerche e studi su società e politica in Italia 1: 481–514, 1987; Tullio-Altan, La nostra Italia: Arretratezza socioculturale, clientelismo, trasformismo e ribellismo dall’Unità ad oggi, Feltrinelli, 1986; Trigilia,Grandi partiti e piccole imprese: