Senso civico e performance economica. Un’analisi longitudinale delle province italiane, 1980-2000

The paper builds on R. D Putnam’s research work on civicness in Italian regions and on the debate it started. Using both the conceptual frame and the empirical indicators developed by this literature, the authors study civicness and its relation to economic performance on the aggregate level. The data used are referred to Italian administrative districts (province) at three time points (early 80s, early 90s, early 2000s), and are analysed with LISREL models of structural equations. First, civicness is modelled as a latent variable in a longitudinal measurement structure. Authors find that such a model can include, besides the indicators which are normally used in the literature (frequency of associations; participation to european elections; diffusion of newspapers), also a measure of participation to cultural activities, which is seldom used in literature. Second, to study the relation between civicness and other ecological variables the authors use a simpler structural models with additive indexes. As for the relation between civicness and economic performance, the model shows that both phaenomena are strictly correlated, but reciprocal effects are not as strong as autocorrelations. Thus, they are quite independent, at least on the short and middle term. The magnitude of the reciprocal effects between civicness and the economy (controlling for the long term correlation) is roughly the same: this finding goes against what Putnam found analysing Italian regions. Third, if one adds to this model a measure of human capital, the structure of the effects does not change at all. Fourth, if the model is extimated separately for the Northern and Southern districts, the structure of the effects between civicness and the economy changes: in the North a stronger effect of civicness on the economy is found, while in the South this effect does not exist but the inverse effect of economy on civicness is quite strong. This finding casts some doubts on the adequacy of this kind of measures and analyses, specially for the Italian case.