A Geography of “Identity” Trust in Italy

The chapter addresses the definition of the concept of trust, proposing two interpretations: trust as “calculation”, based on an assessment of the risk involved in trust, and trust as “identity”, understood as faith in the unknown other. Two aspects of the concept which connect well with the two main conceptions of social capital: social capital as an individual resource – à la Bourdieu (1980) – and social capital as a collective resource (civicness) – à la Putnam (1993) – with its connotations of bridging and bonding. After addressing the problem of empirical observation of the two faces of trust, the paper focuses on an analysis of “identitary” trust in Italy, by means of a cross-national and cross-regional comparative analysis over an extended period. The main results highlight the deficit of trust characterising Italy as against the principal European countries and the steady levelling out – in relation to previous analyses (Putnam 1993) – of the differences between the various regions of Italy.