HAS ITALY BECOME A TOCQUEVILLIAN DEMOCRACY? A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF THE DETERMINANTS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

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 Italian national election panel (ITANES), through structural equation modelling (SEM) we test for several forms of association, whether at the micro level the theory of political socialization of associations holds. We also test alternative models, such as the theory of self-selection, or the theory of reverse causation. Finally, in order to give more insight to our findings we run a latent class analysis identifying different profiles of participation among the Italian population. Chapter 9 summarizes our findings, thinking upon the general interpretation of results and discussing the implications for future research. Analyses show firstly that the thesis of "cognitive mobilization" (which gives importance to changing levels of education in society, and to changing attitudes through a process of generational replacement) is only partially able to explain the evolutions of the macro trends of participation in Italy. Secondly, they show that it is not possible to claim which of the causal model tested worked better. Indeed, self-selection models worked only slightly better than political socialization models, but neither worked properly because participation in conventional politics and in civil society associations in Italy do not seem to be much connected to each other. We then conclude that, in a context like Italy, looking only at the demand side (individual characteristics or individual experiences within social groups) distorts the analysis because it is necessary to look also at the characteristics of the political offer and of the socio-political context in which citizens decide to participate, as well as at the structure of political parties. If these were found to be depending on the wider political context, the thesis of social capital might have to be rethought as being context-dependent. Since this research empirically studies only one country in a longitudinal way, however, studying the influence of the political offer is not possible if only in a speculative way. Non-empirically, the Italian "paradox" can indeed be solved in the following way. Italian political system has been modernized under fascism that, being a totalitarian regime, used to mobilize people to participate in a top-down way. This has strongly influenced the structure of the post-war Italian political system, since major parties (DC-Christian Democrats and PCI-Communist Party) were actually structured and functioned in the same way as Fascist party did, although with an extremely different ideological content. Relatively high levels of political participation in late 1950s were then not due to bottom-up participation in a pluralistic democracy, but they were rather a consequence of top-down mobilization of quite homogeneous sub-cultures (as states within the state, and against it). This situation slowly changed with increasing levels of economic and educational resources in society, and change in the international context of the Cold War, finally leading toward a crisis of political parties. When the political system collapsed in the 1990s due to bribery scandals, political parties changed their structure, relating much more on communication via mass media rather than on local branches of parties. The result was that people virtually stopped to participate in conventional politics also because they were no more mobilized from above to participate. Social participation increased across time on the one hand because number of social associations increased, because of higher levels of resources in society, while on the other hand, it can be argued that this increase is the consequence of a closed party system that is not able to incorporate citizens demands, and this is particularly true for the most politicized types of social associations, such as trade unions or social movements associations. Finally, political efficacy remains constant and low across time because of idealized views that citizens hold of political participation, along with perceptions of a closed party system that does not have transparent channels of recruitment and that does not treat citizens in equal ways. We conclude with a question to be investigated in future research: does this peculiar evolution of the socio-political context concerns only Italy, that has apparently not yet become a pluralistic Tocquevillian democracy, or is Italy only an extreme case of a more general European phenomenon, where countries have historically been politicized in a different way than the US (top-down vs. bottom-up, as Tocqueville and then Weber already reported long time ago)?