HAS ITALY BECOME A TOCQUEVILLIAN DEMOCRACY? A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF THE DETERMINANTS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
Tesi di Dottorato
Data di Pubblicazione:
2012
Citazione:
HAS ITALY BECOME A TOCQUEVILLIAN DEMOCRACY? A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF THE DETERMINANTS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION / M. Poletti ; supervisor: P. Segatti ; co-supervisor: G. Ballarino ; PhD coordinator: L. Leonini. Universita' degli Studi di Milano, 2012 Mar 15. 24. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2011. [10.13130/poletti-monica_phd2012-03-15].
Abstract:
In the early 1960s Italy was described as a country characterized both by high disaffection and low social participation, not a picture of a healthy democracy particularly if compared with other more economically advanced countries, characterized by a participant civic culture. Since the country was divided between a partisan minority that actively participated in political parties (and related organizations), and those who did not participate at all, the decentralized pluralistic democracy proposed by Tocqueville was still non-existing in Italy. In the last sixty years Italian society has undergone a process of modernization and mass scholarization that significantly changed the socio-political context: the levels of resources in society increased, an intense season of social mobilization led to an expansion and growth of civil society participation and to a gradual separation from subcultural belonging.
According to the neo-Tocquevillian thesis of political socialization of associations, the slow, but persistent, upward movement of Italian social participation and civil associations should have then transformed Italian parochial citizens into participant citizens, with higher political efficacy and more likely to participate at higher rates in politics in less partisan ways. Yet, while political disaffection has stayed quite constant (and extremely high) through the years. Moreover, conventional political participation, relatively high in the 1960s compared to other countries, has undergone a slow but profound crisis since the 1980s while electoral participation, that had been surprisingly high since the end of the war (more than 90% turnout), and quite stable for many years, started to decrease. What appears from these macro level trends of the socio-political context is a paradox in light of social capital theories: in Italy the theory that sees the spread of social associations as producing participatory citizens has not worked, and at the macro level the three indicators of interest, social participation, political disaffection and political participation, seem to follow rather independent behavioural paths. We investigated why it is so and whether the same relation can be found at the micro level.
Whereas this longitudinal study that investigates causality is very important for understanding the dynamics at work in Italy, it has much wider implications that go beyond the specificity of a single country. Since we find similar results at the macro and micro levels, the underlying mechanism hypothesized by social capital theories is empirically undermined, at least in its universalistic perspective.
This volume consists in two main parts. The first part includes Chapter 1 to 3 and relates to a broad and extensive literature review on the world of political and social participation as well as of political disaffection, both in general terms and in more specific terms relating to the Italian case. The second part of the research includes Chapter 4 to 8 and relates to the empirical analyses of the Italian socio-political context. We first describe through secondary data analysis its evolution across time. We then construct a few hypotheses linking education and time in its time-period, political cohort and life-cycle aspects, in order to test with a multi-source pooled dataset whether the thesis of cognitive mobilization of Inglehart and Dalton has been at work in Italy for different types of associations after the post-war process of societal modernization. We finally move to a more analytical level constructing several hypotheses in order to study the existent causal relationship between social participation, political participation and political efficacy. Using a three-wave Itali
Tipologia IRIS:
Tesi di dottorato
Keywords:
political party ; civil society participation ; associations ; social capital ; political efficacy ; disaffection ; cognitive mobilization ; civic voluntarism model ; self-selection model ; Italian socio-political context ; pluralistic democracy
Elenco autori:
M. Poletti
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