Order 832736: Civil Society

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213 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

Path Dependence, Civic Culture, and Differential Government Performance

Robert D. Putnam’s Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993) sought to account for differential performance of regional governments in terms of culture, and for systemic variance between north and south in terms of the medieval legacy of civic norms and networks. At a time when the study of comparative poli tics seemed increasingly to privilege cross-national analysis, Making Democracy Work stood out as an important reminder that “compar ative political research of the broadest philosophical and theoretical implications can be executed within a single country” (LaPalombara 1993, 550). The study has been hailed as a “stunning breakthrough in political culture research” (Laitin 1995, 171), contributing to “a renaissance of political culture” beyond the Italian peninsula in ways that Banfield’s work did not (e.g., Jackman and Miller 1996). Put nam’s work made other contributions to comparative inquiry. It brought the study of Italian politics “back in” and broadened it, pre cisely at a time when favourite Italian research topics among compar ativists — such as leftist parties and national trade unions — no longer seemed to have the old currency. Making Democracy Work further suggested that, contrary to the view often expressed, Italy’s past need not always be viewed as a burden. Indeed, it was the use of the past to explain differential effectiveness in contemporary regional govern ments that made Putnam’s study an important work. It is, in turn, path dependence analysis that sharply distinguishes Making Democ racy Work from its earlier Italian-language version (Putnam, Leonar di, and Nanetti 1985), adds more lustre to the former, and endows

Putnam’s argument with a strong sense of intellectual closure and a seemingly flawless protective belt.

Putnam stated some unremarkable findings when he reported that the medieval monarchical and republican regimes worked differently, that modern public institutions work better in some parts of Italy than in others, and that the south has fewer expressions of voluntary joint or collective efforts than does the north. But for Putnam’s explanation of these findings to hold, three things must be true. The first is that the Italian regional experiment was a “natural” experiment, to be approached in the same way that “a botanist might study plant devel opment by measuring the growth of genetically identical seeds sown in different plots” (Putnam 1993, 7, emphasis added). The second is that patterns of civic culture best explain differential effectiveness in regions. The third is that these modern social patterns are plainly trace able to the monarchical and republican regimes of medieval times.

One objective of this chapter is to show that neither logic nor evi dence bears out such an interpretation. The regional experiment was hardly a “natural” experiment. Patterns of civic culture do not explain all of the story about regional government performance. As hinted in chapters 4 and 8, differential behaviours in different regions cannot be explained unless one introduces the rich historical diversity that char acterizes each region — and this Putnam was prevented from doing by the very method of analysis he used. The other, more general objective of the chapter, then, is to show that the substantive claim about how development proceeds explains why some of Putnam’s findings are unsurprising and the great majority of his other findings are either mis leading or wrong (cf., Bagnasco Goldberg 1996; M. Levi 1996; Lupo 1993a, i993b; Tarrow 1996).

To be sure, not all the problems in Making Democracy Work are attributable to the assumptions of path dependence. For example, Put nam began his inquiry with sketches of Ban and Bologna, the regional capitals of Apulia and Emilia-Romagna respectively. The stark contrast is an effective literary device. The problem is that his story does not match the facts on the ground, insofar as they can be independently verified; Putnam’s narrative misleads readers who have to rely on the author for a description of those cities and for civic practices through out Italy (Putnam 1993, —6).’ It seems petty to point out inaccurate and exaggerated small details — minutiae in a rich story — but such details assume importance only because Putnam so effectively employed them to paint a picture that is not quite true to life.

It is my contention in this chapter that a path dependence forma mentis or mindset goes a long way in accounting for the flaws that dis able Making Democracy Work. The strength of path dependence as a

2.14 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed 2.15 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

substantive claim about how development proceeds consists in com bining fortuitous contingencies of an initial phase with a deterministic logic concerning the subsequent process — both people and their behav iours are locked in as a consequence of their past history (e.g., Hodg son 1991). In the first section of the chapter, I shall point to the prob lems that path dependence analysis created for Putnam’s understand ing of the medieval legacy; in the second, I shall advance the argument that institutions more modern than the medieval ones Putnam consid ered have shaped the civic society and constitute a south different from what Putnam and others took for granted. From this vantage point, it should be easier to see that the creation of regional governments and differences in regional government performance have been deeply mis understood. Above all, I shall argue that Putnam has drawn the wrong lessons from history and from the creation and performance of region al government. This is not to suggest that there are no north-south dif ferences, but rather to point out that differentials in development remain poorly understood.

THE MEDIEVAL LEGACY

Putnam’s inquiry into the historic roots of contemporary problems is very much part of the tradition of Italian scholarship and public dis course. Perhaps one of the best-known practitioners in this tradition is Carlo Cattaneo, the Milanese publicist with the reputation of an uncompromising Risorgimento radical democrat whom we met in chapter 3. Cattaneo and Putnam share an interest in civic community and social capital. In Cattaneo’s 1858 essays on “The City as an Orga nizational Principle for Understanding the Course of Italian History,” he used the legacy of medieval Italy to place in sharp relief the Italian civic tradition, to argue against the creation of a unitary, monarchical regime, and to press for a federal, republican solution to the making of modern Italy in the i86os (Cattaneo [1858] 1957, 2:383—437). The title of Putnam’s co-authored 1985 book on the Italian regions, La pianta e le radici, was taken from Cattaneo’s characterization of liber ty as a plant of many roots; moreover, several passages from Cattaneo’s work grace the frontispiece of the book, fittingly published under the aegis of the Cattaneo Research Institute of Bologna, a prestigious inde pendent social science research centre. A consideration of how Catta neo approached the past clarifies what is new and what is old in Put nam’s thesis and where the two analysts differ.

Writing in 1839, in an essay setting out what became a lifelong research program, Cattaneo noted the challenge awaiting those inter ested in issues of political development: how to navigate between the

doctrines of extreme rationalism of the past two centuries and the deterministic doctrines of his own time so as to understand how par ticular institutions emerge; how they change over time; and how insti tutional arrangements affect individual and institutional behaviours as well as development potentials more generally. The pressing task, he stressed, was to construct a “public science or economy” incorporat ing history, institutions, culture, and individuals — not as blind instru ments of a particular time and culture, but as beings capable through their actions of destroying, derailing, or refashioning the heredity of the past (Cattaneo [1839a] 1960, 1:95—142). In the end, and after more than twenty volumes, Cattaneo did not quite succeed in fashion ing this new “public science.” He seldom had the time, or the inclina tion, to return to his ideas and develop them fully, so, for example, he did not pursue the implication of his (and his mentor, Gian Domenico Romagnosi’s) insights about transaction analysis. But his dynamic view of the world and his appreciation that “the state” may be nothing but rules manipulated for public and private ends sharply differentiates his logic of inquiry from Putnam’s. Cattaneo also shared little of Putnam’s benign view of government.

As we saw in chapter ,

Cattaneo argued that the most productive way to make sense of the vicissitudes of more than two thousand years of recorded history of Italy is to examine the question of self-govern ment as an empirical and theoretical question. Thus the i 858 essays on the Italian civic tradition can be read at different levels: the city as an historical community; as a manifestation of the struggle for self-gover nance over time; and as a conceptual variable on the basic human real ity (consorzio umano) identifying “democracy” with the universality of the local community, not with parliamentary government or even rep resentative assemblies.

Cattaneo went back to ancient times — to the civic culture of Magna Graecia in the south, and of the Etruscan communities in the centre and the north. He identified several periods in the history of Italian cities; drew no sharp differences between city and countryside, a fea ture of Italian life that has sharply differentiated its rural population from northern European counterparts; and ended his account with the city republics in the fourteenth century. Unlike Putnam, Cattaneo iden tified characteristics of civic traditions throughout Italy: the role of local community in the historic memory and consciousness of people; the importance of municipal institutions; and the cities as self-govern ing, law making entities adapted to local ecological niches.

As we saw, Cattaneo credited the municipal institutions in the south for keeping alive remnants of civic, life in Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire, when municipal institutions had become nearly extinct

ii6 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed

in the north. Though the portrayal is generally considered accurate as far as it goes, it stops precisely when northern communes were declin ing as free cities.

Cattaneo drew attention to two dissimilar sources of ruptures that had roughly similar results: the creation of a medieval kingdom in the south; and the insufficiency of city republics in the north. The position of southern cities in the new political economy changed for the worse. Local communities, including the free cities of Amalfi and Naples (the latter, one of the oldest Greek cities), were now subordinated to the extraneous and adverse principle of domination. Soon they became powerless, servile, and dull, while their inhabitants became estranged and indifferent to the place in which they lived.

Cattaneo equally suggested the insufficiency of the northern civic tradition for the constitution of a self-governing society. He attributed this insufficiency to three factors that have been, better documented since his own time: i) the opportunities provided by governmental institutions for the rise of self-perpetuating local oligarchies; z) the practical absence of overlapping arrangements among city republics (i.e., a federal or polycentric system of governance); and ) more importantly, the intellectual failure to conceptualize the possibility of federal arrangements. These factors led to the breakdown of fiduciary relationships among the people of communes, the transformation of differences into factional struggles, despotic governments (signorie) and, eventually, foreign domination and conquest. By the fourteenth century, deep ruptures in civic culture had occurred in varying degrees and, and for different reasons, throughout Italy.

Cattaneo and Putnam share a particular retrospective view of “feu dalism” and both tend to use a very wide brush to paint their canvas. Contrary to what Cattaneo suggested, Amalfi continued to have a rich civic life well after it was incorporated into the medieval kingdom. The Amalfitan Table continued, well after the eleventh century, to regulate southern commercial practices and was freely adopted by northern city republics — not a small case of self-enforcing rules prevailing through out the peninsula in spite of political divisions (Del Treppo and Leone 1977; see also Greif 1998; Sabetti 1999a). Putnam’s method of analy sis led him to exaggerate more than Cattaneo and to lock people and their behaviours into predetermined games of life for centuries. This absolved Putnam of the responsibility of looking at how and which his tory matters over time. Thus, Putnam presents us with sharply differ ent political consequences over a long period: in the north the people were citizens — in the south, subjects; authority was dispersed in the north, monopolized by the king in the south; horizontal relations in one, vertical social hierarchy in the other; collaboration, mutual assis

2.17 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

tance, civic obligations and trust versus hierarchy, domination, mis trust, and incivisme. Whereas collective life in north Italy was viewed as almost always healthy and strong, in the south collective life was viewed as blighted for a thousand years and more (Putnam 1993, esp. i 6z—3). This characterization not only overstated the case, but also did several other things badly.

First, it endowed pre-i86o southern kings (or their respective viceroys) with monopoly powers they seldom had, in theory or prac tice. The Neapolitan parliament, while tamed to servility and silence, fell into desuetude only by 1642, without, however, losing the hold that it had in running the Naples city government (Seggi). Indeed, between 1642 and 1734, when Naples acquired its own Bourbon king, viceregal authority was compelled to come to terms with the Seggi, which functioned as a kind of new Neapolitan parliament. The Sicilian parliament, though weakened in its organization and powers, stub bornly clung to the last vestiges of authority in matters of taxation and its claim of representing the Sicilian nation (i.e., the baronial class) before the monarch as late as 1812.

Hence, whereas the Neapolitan aristocracy became a court nobility only after 1734, if at all (Astarita 1992; Galasso 1982) the Sicilian aris tocracy that controlled parliament retained some of the functions inherent in the prerogatives of rule into the nineteenth century. The parliamentary barons’ claim that they were “associates of the sover eign” in governing Sicily was no empty boast. Many different Sicilian parliamentary barons managed, over time, to be successful agrarian capitalists. Thus, just as the king’s monopoly powers were checked by parliamentary barons, so the monopoly powers of parliamentary barons were checked by dynastic, community and market requirements that applied to the fiefs as political, social, and economic ventures. Both monarchs and parliamentary lords faced common constraints: the entrepreneurial skills required to manage each “family firm” and residual earnings could not always be passed on as an inheritance. The history of Sicilian fiefs as capitalist enterprises engaged in the produc tion and sale of grain in Sicily and Europe as late as the seventeenth century — “the golden age of baronial jurisdiction” — has not yet been written, but one thing seems clear: the history of baronial jurisdiction is not simply the history of exploitative relationships of rulers to ruled, ruinous lordships, and antiquated agrarian economies (see also Astari ta 1992, 108—58; Epstein 1992. ). A concern with how people create and maintain efficiency-enhancing and inefficiency-prone institutions led Cattaneo to suggest the need to compare the evolution of Norman institutions in England and Sicily in a set of notes on Britain, written in English around 1834 and published only in Murray 1959). The

ii 8 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed

insight that the route to modern representative institutions in south Italy had the potential of passing through feudal institutions was one that Putnam’s explanatory scheme did not allow him to pursue.

Second, and not surprising, Putnam’s characterization of southern Italy tends to fuse long periods of time and to obscure the norms of generalized reciprocity and the network of civic engagement that could be found in the rich variety of self-governing collective efforts at the neighbourhood level and among guilds and mutual aid societies in the different southern cities, towns, and villages under varying political- economic regimes (Cochrane 1986; Sabetti 1999a).

Third, the characterization of perennial exploitation glosses over successive, sometimes successful efforts at overthrowing exploitation and dependence in the larger context in which ordinary people lived and worked. John A. Marino’s research on pastoral economics in the Kingdom of Naples (1988) brings to life additional problems with Put nam’s argument. Marino studied the dogana di Foggia, (Foggia cus toms house, 1447—1806) — the Neapolitan equivalent to the better- known Castilian mesta (guild) — located in Capitanata, the most fertile region of Apulia. It was through the Apulian mesta, representing some 4,300 square kilometres of winter pasture in one of the largest plains in the Italian peninsula, that the Kingdom of Naples became a major supplier of raw wool to Europe. Wool production was critical to the internal revenue of the kingdom and, until the early nineteenth centu ry, the sheep customs house of Foggia served as one of the most impor tant financial institutions of the state. Many worlds converged at Fog gia, and their extraordinary permutations were ably traced by Marino in his analysis of three hundred and fifty years of continuity and change. I draw on his work only to emphasize facets of southern his tory generally missed.

The Foggia customs house received its definitive charter around 1447, but pastoralism and its accompanying council of grazers or mesta charged with the task of regulating matters of common concern in southern Italy as in the former Papal States (where they were part of the customs house of the pastures) can be traced back to ancient times. Grazier associations in Capitanata, in particular, antedate the feudal state. As Marino put it: “The sheep owners’ organization ... was an indigenous invention to establish and enforce a set of norms to allow for continued economic cooperation among the pastoral population. From the Southern European transhumant cousins — Mesta and dogana — the centralized medieval state incorporated those already existent sheep owners’ institutions as partners in the royal plan to paci fy and profit from the marginal zone” (Marino 1988, 114). Class con flict among rich and poor sheep owners did exist; but what emerges

2.19 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

from the historical record of the parliament of graziers is the rich asso ciational life that allowed the graziers to put aside or resolve their dif ferences and to confront their common enemies together, be they doganal officers or merchants. “Thus, the sheep customshouse of Fog gia developed a model for participatory democracy from below — even within the hierarchical world of an Old Regime monarchy” (Marino 1988, io). Marino made it evident that horizontal as well as vertical bonds of solidarity and relationships together with a fairly high degree of self-government did exist in one of the most important sectors of the political economy of the Kingdom of Naples for several centuries. Bonds of fellowship also extended to others: “ongoing works of mercy were part of the [graziers’ organization’s] pious duties and association al responsibilities” (Marino 1988, r ii).

There was at least one important difference between the common people of Apulia and the common people living in central and north ern signorie. Whereas commoners in the north did not have the right to bear arms, for fear they would cause disorder or rebellion, the gra ziers on the Apulian plain did have such a right, one of the oldest and dearest rights of citizenship. So what in the south was the right of the lowest of social classes, was in the north the prerogative of the highest of social classes and their retainers.L

In fact, one would never know this from reading almost any of the English-language texts on the “southern question,” because Marino’s history goes against the grain of the prevalent strands of the reigning orthodoxies about the south. In fairness, one would hardly know of it even by reading such Italian classic texts as Benedetto Croce’s The His tory of the Kingdom of Naples (I92.). This highlights a serious histo riographical problem in Putnam’s analysis. He used an approach that did not enable him to sense the antifeudal (and anti-Spanish) bias that has marked much of the literature on south Italy since the eighteenth century. If one is prepared to go beyond the vista interposed by this lit erature, as many others have done in the past thirty years (see review essay, Cochrane 1986), it is possible to discover an extraordinary quantity and variety of documents on civic traditions and the pursuit of collective or joint economic and political opportunities. This docu mentation suggests that, below the power of alternating monarchies, successive viceroys, and self-perpetuating oligarchies, there were, in the cities, towns, and villages of southern Italy, vestiges of communal self governance that, although half-destroyed, were still distinguishable over the entire history of the Kingdom of Naples or the Two Sicilies. These vestiges represented small-scale civitates, or civil societies — dense patterns of social assets involving collaboration, mutual assis tance, civic obligation and trust.

22.0 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed

Civic norms of trust in the law, collaborations, and obligation were as much a feature of the history of southern communes as they were of the history of city republics — including the history of Banfield’s Chiaromonte and Putnam’s Pietrapertosa, if their notarial archives mean anything. Also, Paolo Grossi offers a rich documentary database in his important 1977 work on collective property, available in English since 1981 (Grossi 1981, 1992).

Unintentionally, Putnam presented evidence that undermined his own claim about how development proceeds. In chapter 55 of book one of Niccolô Machiavelli’s Discourses, Putnam found what he said he might term the “iron law of civic community.” Machiavelli, Putnam noted, has “a passage of remarkable relevance to my own task of understanding institutional success and failure” (Putnam 1993, 132.). Putnam would have Machiavelli say that in provinces like Naples “there has never arisen any republic or any political life, for men born in such conditions are entirely inimical to any form of civic govern ment. In provinces thus organized no attempt to set up a republic could possibly succeed” (Machiavelli 1970, 2.46). But what are the provinces that Putnam said Machiavelli regarded “like Naples”? This question goes to the heart of Putnam’s argument.

Putnam failed to indicate that these provinces are the Papal States, Emilia-Romagna, and Lombardy — that is, provinces identified by Put nam as having an almost unbreakable civic tradition were identified by Machiavelli as having such an uncivic tradition that no attempt to set up a republic or “good government” could possibly succeed there! Typical of Machiavelli to think that good or virtuous citizens could be found only in Tuscany (and, possibly, Venice). But the main problem is that what Put nam was inclined to call Machiavelli’s “iron law of civic community” is not supported by Machiavelli’s own evidence. If Machiavelli was correct in his empirical observation, then he was mistaken in his “iron law” — and Putnam was mistaken in giving Machiavelli’s observation the stand ing he did, since it contradicts the claim it was mustered to support.

To sum up, Putnam was correct in drawing attention to two distinc tive types of political regimes in early medieval Italy and to the nega tive consequences of monarchical government. Cattaneo’s work shows that this thesis is an old one. What is new in Putnam is, unfortunately, the fruit of some profound misunderstandings. A path dependence per spective prevented Putnam from considering i) that the roots of civic cultures throughout Italy go much deeper than medieval times; 2.) that civic traditions were not entirely extinguished in the south by the cre ation of the medieval kingdom, just as they were not entirely extin guished in the north by the dissolution of city republics; and 3) that the civic practices of any area are more fluctuating than the logic of path

22.1 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

dependence would lead us to believe. Cattaneo’s work shows more of an awareness that the interplay of complex factors over time cannot be accommodated by particular “iron laws,” be they simplistic renderings of history or deterministic conceptions of development.

The work of Cattaneo and Marino can be brought together to advance an alternative argument about north-south differentials: graz ers on the Apulian plain and water appropriators on the Lombard plain of the Po River operated terra terra with roughly similar norms and net works of civic engagement, but the critical difference in their exigencies of life and work had to do with the megaconstraints imposed by geog raphy (earthquake areas in the south), economics, and politics (see also Epstein 1992). These larger constraints, more than civil society or civic norms and networks, are the keys to understanding differentials in development. Some of these constraints, such as geography, are con stants; others are variables, and to these I specifically turn next to pin point their historical legacy for contemporary Italy.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF HISTORICAL LEGACY

If the medieval legacy portrayed in Making Democracy Work cannot provide the appropriate historical context for understanding regional government performance, which history matters then? I suggest that what matters in the history of Italian political economy are the growth of governmental institutions since the eighteenth century and the enduring presence of ecclesial infrastructures in civil society. Whereas the basic logic of governmental arrangements generally sought to dis solve local civic assets in the south, the basic logic of ecciesial arrange ments sought to build them up. While church-affiliated organizations have a long history, they ceased to be the only major network in civil society by the 189os. The growth of autonomous workers’ solidarity leagues, not long after national governments stopped putting them down, suggests that horizontal norms and networks of solidarity can emerge under conditions that many analysts have steadfastly, and mis takenly, described as culturally infertile terrain for such norms and net works. I thus advance another argument: institutions of political econ omy more modern than the ones Putnam considers have shaped the civic society and constitute a south different from the north, and from the south Putnam and others have taken for granted.

The Role of Governmental Institutions

The growth of governmental institutions in Italy involved two transi tion periods; each transition period in turn shaped the subsequent

r zzz Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed

structure of political and economic life. The cumulative impact or his torical legacy of these transitions went into making a new south.

The first transition period was brought about by the Enlighten ment, which Sicilian, Neapolitan, Lombard, and Tuscan intellectuals and statesmen (often one and the same) shared with their counter parts elsewhere in Europe. Italy gave the general clash between “utopia and reform” its own colour (Venturi 1971), as we noted in chapter 2..

When allowance is made for the constraining presence or liberating absence of foreign rule, the differential impact of the intellectual, polit ical, and economic forces of the Enlightenment among the Italian states, including the Papal States, can be summarized as follows: the more abstract the ideas, the more sweeping the attempts to liquidate the heredity of the past, the least likely their prospect of success, as in the case of the South; the more practical the ideas, the more “margin al” the changes, the higher their prospect of success, as in the case of the Papal States, Tuscany and Lombardy. Sicily stood in relation to Naples almost exactly as Lombardy stood in relation to Austria. What explains the policy variance, then, given the fact that these regimes were both autocratic in nature and that “elite public opinion” in both Lombardy and Sicily favoured reforms?

Two critical variations explain the different attempts at reform. Drawing on Margaret Levi’s conceptual elaboration (1988), the first variation was the relative bargaining power, transaction costs, and discount rates of Lombard and Sicilian “rulers” vis-â-vis their respec tive viceroys: the Sicilian parliamentary barons were stronger and more united than were their Lombard counterparts, who represented different and conflicting interests. The second had to do with alterna tive Enlightenment conceptions on how best to repair failings in gov ernment and agriculture: whereas Austrians and Lombards shared, for different reasons, the same “ideology” for remedial action, Sicilian barons looked to Britain, “Sicily’s sister island,” while Neapolitan viceroys looked to France. This is why the tabula rasa approach failed in Sicily, and why the more modest reforms in Lombardy and else where succeeded.

Two important consequences are worth noting for pinpointing sources of modern regional diversity. The moderate reforms in land, as in the community-based enclosure movement in Tuscany; in taxation, as in the tax reform in Lombardy which drew praise from Adam Smith (Smith [1776] 1965, 886); and in local administration, as in the Papal States — all were evolutionary in nature and contained, in varying degrees, mechanisms for correcting problems as they emerged. By con trast, the second consequence was that neither constitutional nor sec

2.2.3 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

ondary changes were possible, especially in Sicily. Its parliamentary barons had also, by the 1790s, acquired a new awareness of their con stitutional rights. For these reasons, the second transition period brought more profound changes in the south than in the north.

In northern Italy, the impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period was more in fostering the growth of Italian nation alism than in fundamentally recasting existing institutional arrange ments. By contrast, in the two politically separate parts of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the impact went much deeper, precisely because ear lier successes in preventing an erasure of the past now made ancient institutions stand in sharper relief. Three profound ruptures took place in the political economy of the south between i8o and i86.

First, there was a basic restructuring of property rights in rural land, albeit for different reasons and by different actors. On the mainland south, French-inspired Neapolitan liberals abolished in i 8o6 remnants of feudal privileges of the nobility, transformed complex forms of property in land into private property — largely for themselves — and initiated what eventually took place in liberal Italy in 1865, the dis bandment of the Apulian mesta. In Sicily, parliamentary barons went further. In 1812 they gave up all the former privileges of their rank, transformed fiefs into private property for themselves, and prevailed upon the Bourbon king to promulgate a new Sicilian constitution endowing Sicily with a system of parliamentary monarchy and taxa tion far more representative even than that of Britain.

A complex matrix of choices involving internal and external events brought a second rupture by i 816. A reformulated absolutist Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was established, with a system of government and administration borrowed from the French and supported by Austrian arms. All the kingdom was divided into provinces; Sicily lost almost all the vestiges of its nationhood and independence, including flag and parliament. The enforcement of regulations issued from Naples became subject to serious institutional weakness and failure; at the same time, control over agricultural resources now gave new southern landowners — Sicilian barons and their agents — a political power they had never had before.

The earlier economic and political ruptures weighted the constitu tional outcome of the Risorgimento in the direction of a centralized system of government and administration. The making of liberal Italy fits Hobbes’s Leviathan better than the making of the medieval monar chy: ordinary people had the constitutional right to say “yes” or “no” to the creation of the Italian state, but lost that right and became mere subjects as soon as the new commonwealth was proclaimed. The third rupture for the people in the south lay elsewhere, however, in the

224 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed

wholesale remodelling of secondary laws and other institutional arrangements that directly impinged on everyday life as well as on the intergenerational cycle of life — from state monopolies on tobacco, matches, fire arms, stamp paper, and salt (economies on which cities like Trapani depended) to military conscription; from a radically new system of excise duties to pay for the new national debt to numerous mutations in currency, weight, and land measures; and even in new lin guistic meanings of common and juridical terms. It was these “mun dane” changes, more than the new constitutional regime itself, that would make Sicily “the Ireland of Italy,” as Sicilian political economist Francesco Ferrara was bold enough to tell Count Camillo Benso di Cavour in July i86o (Ferrara [i86o] ‘949, 300).

Let me now bring the two transition periods and the ruptures in the second transition period together and sketch, in a brief and stylized fashion, their impact on civil society in the south. I shall then compare this sketch with Putnam’s presentation.

One legacy is the creation of great estates under single proprietor ship. Capitanata became the heart of latifundism in Apulia only by the late i86os. Although these changes are much later than in Sicily and Calabria, the transformation was just as profound. The abolish ment of the dogana di Foggia did away with all the infrastructures, including social capital, connected with wool production. It was the “scramble for land” affecting about 4,000 square kilometres of the plain that led Capitanata to be known as “the California of the South” and the “Texas of Apulia.” Two classes of people could be found there by the end of the nineteenth century: large landowners and a proletarian workforce. The entire plain was now owned by no more than 500 landlords; up to 85 per cent of those who cultivated the land were landless daily labourers (see 1901 census figures in Snowden 1986, 10, ao—z).

The phenomenon of southern latifundism, far from being a relic of medieval times, is of more recent origin — the intended and unintended consequences of the political changes in the nineteenth century. In 1876 Sidney Sonnino (1847—1922), the Pisan nobleman and minister of foreign affairs during the First World War, observed in the classic study of Sicilian rural conditions he wrote with Leopoldo Franchetti, his travelling companion and fellow Tuscan nobleman that: “the situ ation we found in i 860 persists today ... We have legalized the exist ing oppression and are assuring the impunity of the oppressors. In modern societies, tyranny of the law is restrained by fears of remedies outside the law. In Sicily, with our institutions patterned on liberal for malism rather than informed by a true spirit of liberty, we have fur nished the oppressing classes the legal means to defend their oppres

225 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

sion and to take over all public positions by the use and abuse of power that was and continues to be in their hands” (Sonnino [1876] 1974). In sharp disagreement with the parliamentary commission on Sicilian conditions which had just reported that “in Sicily there exists neither a political question nor a social [i.e., agricultural] question” (R. Bonfa dini 1876, quoted in Carbone and Grispo 1969, 2:1077), Sonnino con tinued,”we are now strengthening the oppressors’ hands by reassuring them that, no matter how far they push their oppression, we will not tolerate any kind of illegal remedy, while there can be no legal remedy, for they have legality on their side” (quoted in Sabetti 1984, 48). Most ordinary people thus found themselves locked in what Sonnino called an “iron circle.” On one hand, they suffered labour contracts imposed by the monopoly of large landowners or their agents and supported by the armed power of the state; on the other, they bore the cost of gov ernment — including more than three years of conscription for young males — without voice and with little benefit.

A logic of mutually destructive relationships came to dominate work and community life, and only in this period does Antonio Gramsci’s characterization of the south as a great social disaggregation apply somewhat. It is this legacy that helps to situate historically the politi cal economy of crime and punishment discussed in part 3 (see also Sabetti 1984). But it is still an open historical question whether local mafias were ab origine part of the oppressing classes, or whether such expressions of collective action developed as attempts by some ordi nary people, after i86o, to alter a game of life rigged against them, resulting in the end only in new forms of predatory rule on other ordi nary people, landowners, and the state. The extent to which antimafia forces, including political parties and social movements, managed not to become the mirror image of what they sought to destroy also remains to be determined (Sabetti 1984, 111—217; 1996). In the popu lar and scholarly literature, the latifundian legacy of southern Italy continued to exist even after a series of interconnected events — the growth of agricultural cooperatives by the 189os, the “land invasions” between 1919 and 1921, market demands of grain with declining labour population (due to new exit, labour, and sharecropping laws in 1944—45) that placed considerable limits on the property rights of big landowners — had by 1947 largely relegated the latifundian legacy to the past.

A reliable survey of the National Institute of Agricultural Econom ics (INEA) conducted between 1946 and 1947 revealed the extraordi nary number of private holdings, the very small size of most proper ties, and the relatively small extent of genuinely large holdings in the south. Moreover, the rapid industrialization then taking place in north

226 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed 2.27 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

Italy and the demand for labour abroad provided powerful incentives for people to leave the rural areas and thus to undermine the prospect of land reforms premised on the assumption that a large number of southern people should “remain on the farm” as small landowners and cultivators. Nevertheless, under pressures from parties on the left, land reform came to be accepted by most Italian politicians as a major remedy for the ills affecting south Italy, and the year 1950 began a short period of land reform legislation in Sicily and other parts of the south. These reforms did, in time, do away with the few remaining truly large landholdings in Sicily and Calabria without, however, achieving the anticipated improvements in agricultural productivity and the working and living conditions of the rural population. The reforms also did little to improve the electoral success of the left, as they revealed that the Italian Way to Socialism itself was based more on myths about the south than facts (Sabetti 1984, 170—8, and the lit erature cited therein). At the same time, by extending social security legislation by the middle of the 19505 to farmowners who were mid dle-aged or elderly and had paid little or no contribution to social security, the DC-led national government did improve its electoral suc cess among southern voters. But it also incurred the cost of encourag ing an older, less productive generation of the farm population to remain on the land and, in effect, to raid the nascent social security funds, since they had contributed the least or not at all (Sabetti 1984, 186—9; Tarrow 1977, 90—I).

A second legacy is one that, as we noted in chapter on problem solving by central planning, Italy shares with other countries with rep resentative systems of government: the presupposition of parliamen tary sovereignty, accentuated in the Italian case by the stato di diritto. Government policy-making since the postunification period confirms the view prevalent among both Italian radical democrats and public finance specialists after the i86os, that “the monopolistic process of legislation is a spontaneous product of parliamentary regimes” (De Viti De Marco [1903] 1965, 249). The monopolistic process has produced, in fact, two parallel — if contradictory — tendencies in problem solving by legislation: nationalization and privatization. The effects have often been the same.

The disastrous effects in south Italy of nationalizing the rich hori zontal and vertical mosaic of ventures in public beneficence that had existed from feudal times and of privatizing what previously had been a vast bundle of alternatives to private property are well documented by successive generations of Italian scholars. There is no intention here to idealize the status quo ante; most long-standing local ventures had developed serious failings as civic assets by the i86os and were in

need of reform. What I want to stress are two overlapping points. First, by retaining the greatest number of civic assets from its feudal past, the south was especially vulnerable to problem solving by national legislation. Second, by attempting to reform, direct, and supervise almost all those local undertakings, national legislators effectively excluded the possibility that communities of citizens — groups of principals — could take part in repairing institutional fail ings, and exposed those enduring civic ventures, often still endowed with considerable financial assets, to predatory rule by members of the national governing class itself.

Beginning in the i88os, the Italian parliament attempted to rectify some of the problems that previous legislative measures had created, often through special laws for the south. But the earlier nationalization or privatization of civic assets could not be undone, while special or “exceptional” national laws for the south became increasingly stan dard practice, reaching dramatic proportions after the Second World War. Special laws and funds for the south have over time had the effect of bringing within the reach of most people amenities of modern life and standard of living unexampled in the history of the area. These laws have also enhanced the prerogatives of state and party officials and allowed them to dominate local and regional development (see Trigilia ‘99, 1995a).

A third legacy is that members of the governing class -shown in the political career of Sidney Sonnino between i88o and 1919, for exam ple, as well as in many of the parliamentary debates until Fascist times — were themselves critically aware of the shortcomings in the structure of basic social institutions. As discussed in chapter 4, the problem was that changes in the instrumentalities of government would have given support to localized groups intent on asserting an inherent right of self- government in the whole area of political economy, and thus, it was feared, demolished the work of the creators of the Italian state. This problem — widely debated at least since Ferrara’s memorandum to Cavour of July i8 6o, discussed in chapter a — persisted after the Sec ond World War. The creation of a regionalist state was one solution. But another solution was put in place by 1896, and lasted almost until Fascist rule: keep the machinery of government as it is, but leave unen forced or apply leniently many unjust, harsh, and arbitrary laws. This, in the end, gave Giovanni Giolitti’s “new liberalism” a bad reputation, especially among intellectuals. As will be recalled from chapter i, Gae tano Salvemini labelled Giolitti the “minister of the underworld” (mm istro della malavita), in direct contrast to how Giolitti saw himself, as the minister of good government, and to how he would appear some thirty years later to both Salvemini and the Communist leader Palmiro

22.8 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed

Togliatti, (Salvemini [‘9451 1960, xxi; Togliatti [19501 ‘973). Under Giolitti’s “new liberalism,” many new forms of voluntary collective efforts emerged in the south as in the north, unimpeded by govern mental action.

Norms of generalized reciprocity and networks of horizontal associ ations ranged from knitting circles, or “schools,” to local musical bands and olive- and wine-producing consortia, and these have con tinued to present times. New and unprecedented associations were established with the purpose of interesting the greatest possible num ber of people in matters of the commonweal. By 1922. Sicily had the highest number of locally constituted and operated farmer coopera tives and the second-highest number of local (Catholic and non- Catholic) rural credit institutions in Italy; the three regions comprising what is now Calabria had as many rural credit institutions started and operated locally as did Tuscany (Caroleo 1976; Sabetti 1984, 6; Bol lettino 19 50—94). More recent quantitative fieldwork on the role of civic associations in the early years of Italian democracy (1900—24) shows, in fact, no significant differences between northern and south ern Italy (Wellhofer 1998). But it was in the Capitanata region of Apu ha that there emerged a labour movement more powerful, we now know, than its counterpart in Emilia-Romagna. This story is worth elaborating in some detail.

The land workers of Capitanata had been locked in Sonnino’s “iron circle” with the disbandment of the dogana di Foggia in 1865 and the great social disaggregation that had followed the “scramble for land.” But the data gathered by Frank M. Snowden (1986) show that by the turn of the century the landless workers on the Apulian plain had suc cessfully learned to do three things: i) extricate themselves from the logic of mutually destructive relationships; a) organize themselves into a powerful peasant movement placing serious limits on the rights of large landowners; and ) maintain a high degree of internal democra cy in their local and provincial associations by insisting, among other things, that their leaders should come only from their ranks and that no political movement should possess a doctrine beyond the compre hension of its members. It took at least a generation for landless work ers to extricate themselves from the “iron circle,” but by 1911 they had created a strong and powerful labour movement. The Capitanata town of Cerignola became the centre and model of union activism through out Apulia. In part because of this, it became known as “the Bologna of Apulia” (cited in Snowden 1986, ioo).

The workers’ movement in Apulia shared with that of Emilia Romagna several common features, including a strong sense of work er solidarity. But the Apulian movement differed in one important

2.2.9 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

respect. As it spread throughout the towns of Capitanata and beyond to other regions of Apulia, it maintained internal democracy, with a high degree of leaders’ accountability. In contrast, by 192.0 the work ers’ leagues in the Po River valley had become so centralized and hier archical in nature as to be quite unresponsive to local members (Snow- den 1986, 190—I; see also Cardoza 1982, 364—408, esp. 365). The dif ferences between Apulian and northern workers’ organizations were real and became critical as Fascists — Mussolini was Romagna’s native son — sought power. In Apulia the workers’ movement contested the advance of Fascism town by town and showed considerable resilience in the face of Fascist (squadrist) assaults on local headquarters of workers’ leagues. By contrast, in the Po valley, including Emilia Romagna, it was enough to strike only a few individuals to bring chaos to the workers’ leagues, as happened in 1921—22. This is what made Apulia stand apart during the advent of Fascism (Cardoza 1982, chs. 7—8; Snowden 1986, 190). Norms of generalized reciprocity and net works of associations did not become entirely extinct under Fascist rule in Apulia; this allowed Giuseppe Di Vittorio to emerge as the most respected national workers’ union leader after 1944. It seems evident that the Apulian land workers had built more solid foundations for generalized norms of reciprocity and networks of associations than had their counterparts in Emilia-Romagna.

Compare now this sketch of southern conditions with Putnam’s claim of the continuity of a great social disaggregation and individual scioltezza or atomism from medieval times to Gramsci’s era to con temporary times. Putnam’s claim can be perpetuated only at great cost.

First, like Banfield’s, Putnam’s method of analysis did not allow him even to observe, let alone explain, what happened in the course of the nineteenth century to the rich and dense panoply of social assets that had been features of southern civil society since medieval times. Like Banfield, Putnam missed almost altogether the role that governmental action played in dissolving those small-scale civitates.

Second, the view of atomized southern individuals, or scioltezza, — held by Putnam and others he cited, from Pasquale Turiello and Leopoldo Franchetti in the nineteenth century to Gramsci, Sidney G. Tarrow, and Luigi Graziano for this century — has currency only if we either accept Putnam’s benign view of government, or assume, as do the other analysts, that southern peasants and artisans should entrust their aspirations and needs to an enlightened and benevolent modern prince, be it a national parliament (for Turiello and Franchetti) or a Marxist-Leninist party (for Gramsci and others). Both strategies are questionable. They call for an examination of other key texts Putnam used to weave his story.

230 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed

The statement in the 1863 Pasquale report (to the effect that society in Calabria ulteriore is not held together by economic bonds, but only by natural, civil, and religious bonds) can be reinterpreted as an indi rect confirmation both of the upheaval created by the “abolition of feudalism” and of the still strong presence of civil and religious struc tures of village life characteristic of the ancien régime. In fact, Pasquale’s last sentence in the paragraph that Putnam quoted from noted that “the propensity for mutual aid can be found everywhere [in Calabriaj, especially in villages” (quoted in Bevilacqua 1985, 296). Putnam uncomplicated his narrative by omitting this important sen tence. Denis Mack Smith’s discussion (in his modern history of Italy, 1959, 3 4—i) of the absence of community sense in liberal Italy did not refer, as Putnam seemed to suggest, to the absence of community spir it among southern villagers and the like; rather, it referred to the wide spread lack of support for the post-1860 central government and poli cies throughout the entire country — an entirely different matter than what Putnam wished to convey (Putnam 1993, 143).

Even Franchetti’s often-cited views about Sicilian scioltezza take on a different meaning when they are ranged alongside the analysis advanced by his travelling companion, Sonnino. Franchetti’s descrip tion is “institutions free”; it tells us how individuals behave when they are locked in a many-person analogue to the prisoner’s dilemma. Son nino provided the missing links in Franchetti’s account by telling us about the rules or constraints of the game. Gramsci’s “great social dis aggregation,” then, does not mean a lack of community concern, or an inability to act, or a proclivity for vertical, clientelistic politics, but rather the presence of governmental institutions that create serious impediments to both voluntary and public initiatives. The “iron circle” sketched by Sonnino explains “great social disaggregation” better than the “ethos laws” advanced by Putnam and, as we saw in chapter 8, by Banfield.

Third, Putnam’s explanatory schema did not allow him to recognize contradictions in his own argument. He cannot explain the network of secondary associations and community organizations that developed especially after the 1890S: If scioltezza is as universal as it is alleged, how have successive generations of ordinary people in the south, as presumed rational egoists or amoral familists, managed to overcome the logic of collective inaction and the oligarchical tendencies inherent in organizational life? North-south differences in group action and other joint voluntary undertakings are not really comparable unless we take into account the differential impact of governmental action. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, more recent quantitative research on the role of civic associations in the years between 1900 and 192.4 found no

231 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

significant differences between northern and southern Italy — that is, the findings do not support Putnam (Welihofer 1998). By contrast, Sonnino’s method of analysis gave him greater predictive capacity because he did not view ordinary people just as “prisoners” and because he understood better than Franchetti, Banfield and Putnam the rules of the game and how to change them.3

Fourth, Putnam’s method of analysis allowed him to overlook simi larities in civic practices throughout the country. He could observe hor izontal bonds of reciprocity and trust, the mutual aid and exchange of services among neighbours (aiutarella) in north Italian communities, could call up similar practices among residents of Mexico City, Java, and other parts of the world — even among prisoners of some Latin American jail — but could not come to terms with the fact that the same social practices can be found in south Italian cities, towns, and villages. The tenacity of his presumptive knowledge did not prepare him well for his voyage of inquiry to Pietrapertosa; it led him to ignore visible facts on the ground.

Finally, just as Putnam’s explanatory schema allowed him to take only a benign view of governmental action in promoting social capital, so it allowed him to ignore completely the role that a powerful institu tion of civil society has had in creating social capital in the south. I reserve a longer discussion below.

Organized Religion and Civil Society

The view is put forward in chapter of Making Democracy Work that organized religion is an alternative to, or works against, the civic com munity in Italy. This view is advanced, however, on the strength of his torical and contemporary events that suggest the opposite.

As portrayed by Putnam, the church in the north — from medieval times to unification — is only one civil institution among many, itself a local affair with horizontal religious allegiances and alignments. For the same period, by contrast, the church in the south is por trayed as a single entity, as a powerful and wealthy proprietor in the feudal order (Putnam 1993, 130), with presumably negative conse quences for the civic community. It is not clear whether what is meant by “church” is the same in the two contexts; what is less ambiguous is that a unitary-actor model can produce gross distor tions of the historical record.

The church was and is a single entity in spiritual and doctrinal mat ters, but it was not organizationally a single entity or proprietor in the south. Sicilian exceptionalism applies to the church as well. Sicilian churchmen and lay organizations enjoyed considerable autonomy from

232 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed 2.33 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

Rome under the apostolic legateship as late as the nineteenth century. On the mainland south, it was only in 1867 that the system whereby local churches were run entirely by lay people, with appointed priests to administer the sacraments and say mass, and where the local bish op had no right of jurisdiction except in matters quoad spiritualia was abolished. Strong indications exist in the available literature that local parishes, known as chiese ricettizie, were more the norm than the exception throughout the mainland south for many centuries; quite a few of them were run like synagogues, each with its own common property regime — a tradition that can be traced back to medieval times. As a corrective to any tendency to idealize this particular tradi tion in retrospect, it would do well to emphasize that, over time, the chiese ricettizie developed critical failings that could not be easily repaired. The chief point remains, however: the church in the south was a complex and overlapping system of individual and local church es, lay confraternities and congregations of men and women4,mutual aid societies and public-spirited societies (opere pie) operating hospi tals. All were linked in different ways to all sorts of diocesan institu tions and monastic orders — each with its own bundle of property rights and with considerable entrepreneurial initiative in providing material and spiritual benefits to distinct but often overlapping politi cal communities.

For centuries and as late as the i88os — when state regulations effec tively destroyed their capacity to act as essential coproducers of many collective services — all those entities remained very visible neighbour hood institutions, passing on an ethic of community involvement, social responsibility, and mutual assistance among different classes and social equals.5 It was in this sense that the church on the mainland south, in the words of a British analyst, “represented, in a curious form, the embryo of democratic institutions” (Johnston 1904, 1:13). Sonnino observed, paradoxically, that the key factor which made local parishes in Sicily stand out in community life was precisely that “civil society appears to the Sicilian peasant only in the form of rapacious landlords, tax collectors, conscription officers and police officials outside of [the church], he finds nothing but toil, sweat and misery” (quoted in Sabetti 1984, 90).

The papal non expedit ban that forbade Catholics from participat ing in Italian national life for some time after unification was also used to argue that Catholicism and civic involvement are antagonistic. Three aspects of the injunction, seldom noted, give a more nuanced, less negative interpretation of the ban. Keeping in mind the tense church-state relations of the post-1859 period, including the fall of papal Rome in 1870, the non expedit does not appear to be a strong

Vatican response to the nationalization of church properties in 1865 and the serious threats to the liberty of the church itself. Moreover, given the very limited franchise for the first thirty years of the new kingdom, the non expedit applied in practical terms to a relatively small portion of the population: for example, up until i88z only 2. per cent of the population was eligible to vote (about 6zo,ooo male vot ers). At the same time, the ban did not apply to local elections and, in fact, did not negatively affect Catholic community efforts and civic involvement. On the contrary, beginning in 1874 there took place a considerable renewal in Catholic social action that emerged with par ticular strength in Sicily and Calabria after the 189os.

Church-sponsored associations allowed villagers to realize mutual benefits and to participate in self-governing efforts to a degree not pos sible in public, governmental affairs; membership in these associations also served to provide the primary political leadership and social capi tal for other types of concerted action. Far from negating or opposing civic involvement, the non expedit ban actually encouraged committed Catholics to renew their grassroots efforts just at the time when the central government was bent on dissolving social civic assets from the ancien régime. It was these grassroots efforts, undertaken as part of Luigi Sturzo’s apostolic work, that had by 1919 propelled this Sicilian priest and nobleman to national prominence as leader of the newly formed (Catholic) Popular Party. Sturzo’s commitment to self-gover nance was as strong as union leader Giuseppe Di Vittorio’s.

A third line of contention that organized religion in Italy is an alter native to the civic community, and not a part of it, derives in particu lar from the period following Vatican ii in the 196os. Data drawn from aggregate Eurobarometer surveys in (1976, 1985, 1988, and 1989) and some qualitative accounts are used to suggest that “churchgoers seem more concerned about the city of God than the city of man” (Put nam 1993, 107). The conclusion follows: the civic community in today’s Italy is a secular community (Putnam 1993, 109).

First, the Eurobarometer surveys for Italy are well known to be methodologically flawed and notoriously unreliable. In the absence of more reliable surveys, it might be argued that they are the best we have and thus should be used. There is, however, little or no evidence of cau tion in the way Putnam constructed his index of clericalism on the basis of Eurobarometer studies.6 The Putnam index conflates religiosi ty with clericalism, civic community with secularism, and thus erects a false dichotomy between civic community and religious faith. Second, even if the cited sources correctly portray what they observed, it does not mean that they can be taken as accurate representations of Catholic theology, teaching, and practice. In fact, the play on words

134 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed 135 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

with the title of St Augustine’s book, The City of God, reveals mistak en notions about Catholicism. The Roman Catholic Church teaches the inseparability of one’s love of neighbour from the love of God, and not a substitution of one for the other. The journey onward toward sal vation for the Christian begins — in Augustine’s work as in the more recent Second Vatican Council document Lumen gentium flO. 31 — not so much with the flight from the world as with self-examination and self-control, and with a commitment to sanctify the world from with in through the ordinary circumstances of life and work. Third, the call to human dignity, solidarity, and the inseparability of one’s love of neighbour from the love of God have served to build new infrastruc tures of collective efforts and community development in Apulian, Lucan, Calabrian, and Sicilian towns. A large part of the voluntary action sector throughout Italy is connected with social movements inspired by the teachings of the Catholic Church. Christian roots may not always be visible enough to account for social civic assets and com munity efforts in contemporary Emilia-Romagna, but it is a mistake to overlook those roots and civic assets in other parts of the country (e.g. Accattoli 1995; Alongi 1997; CENSIS 1994; Cestaro 1995; Donati 1993; De Leo 199,).

REGIONAL GOVERNMENT

I have shown that two of the three pillars on which Putnam’s analyti cal and empirical scaffold rests cannot withstand close inspection: the historical legacy portrayed by Putnam’s path dependence analysis is profoundly mistaken and cannot be used to explain differential effec tiveness in regions. Cultural patterns and associational networks dis similar from — and richer than — those Putnam describes have been at work in shaping the south. Moreover, taking the basic analytical per spective of representative government with a presupposition of parlia mentary sovereignty places any inquiry about “making democracy work” at risk of drawing the wrong conclusions about legislative out put. Whether the legislative output of regional governments is inter pretable as Putnam suggested remains questionable. Can Putnam’s other pillar withstand close inspection? Was the creation of regional government a “natural” experiment?

Putnam said that “the border of the new governments largely corre sponded to the territories of historical regions of the peninsula, includ ing such celebrated principalities as Tuscany and Lombardy” (Putnam 1993, ). Though it is not clear from the text what he meant by “large ly,” he may have been somewhat correct in matching the present regional boundaries with the territories of Tuscany, Lombardy, and

Emilia-Romagna as representing political entities with historic identi ties. The situation in the south, beginning with what used to be called Abruzzi e Mouse, is more complicated than Putnam allowed. The far ther south one goes, the harder it is to find a historical equivalent of the regional states (see also Sabetti 1997, 403). Several facts stand out.

The regional governments created in 1970 do not match the regions that have existed in southern history, at least not in the same way that they match the historic regions in the north. For centuries, there were at least three Apulias, two Abruzzos, generally three Calabrias, and perhaps the same number for what is now known as Campania — each with its own territorial boundaries, capital, distinct political economy, historical consciousness, and cultural identity. This helps to explain why almost all these areas have been known in Italian in the plural — the Abruzzi, the Puglie, the Calabrie. The creation of regional govern ments made them singular. To be sure, the areas politically united shared the same name, but this did not give the regional experiment there a more spontaneous and less contrived nature (see also Barbera 1994, 46—7; Levy 1996, esp. chs. 1—3).

There were two exceptions: Lucania (or Basilicata), with its relative ly small size and historically distinct boundaries, was left as it was; Mouse was allowed to break away from Abruzzi and form its own regional government, even though the people of Abruzzi (or the Aquila and southern part of it) and Mouse have been historically linked and share close identities. Putnam does not tell us why Mouse was allowed to secede from Abruzzi and have its own regional government even though the historic reasons for such a move are not strong.7 The fact that some Molisan intellectuals and politicians who favoured the cre ation of the Molise region were, or had close ties with, powerful lead ers in the national center-left governing coalition may explain the Mouse exception. This exception reinforces the view that the regional experiment was not a natural one: the borders of the new governments were as much political contrivances of national legislators as they were historical legacies. This point can be illustrated in another way.

National legislators also had authority over which cities should be regional capitals. This decision constituted a mere formality in the case of, say, Turin for Piedmont, Milan for Lombardy, and perhaps even Bologna for Emilia-Romagna, but not so for the southern regions, where more than one city often had equal claims to be the regional cap ital. There was even some opposition in Lucania and Campania, where it was difficult to question the historic importance and claims of Poten za and Naples, respectively. The choice of regional capitals elsewhere proved considerably more contentious. Mass protests were organized in cities with equal claims to be capitals — like Pescara in Abruzzi and

2.36 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed 2.37 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance

Reggio Calabria in Calabria. The protests in Reggio Calabria were strong, cutting across left-right party lines and trade union barriers; so intense did they become that some citizens lost their lives as police tried to contain demonstrators during the so-called revolt of Reggio Cal abria in 1970—71. The riots against making Catanzaro the regional capital caught national legislators, including those from the region, by surprise. The mass revolt explains why Calabria is the only region to have its central machinery of government in two different cities: the de jure regional capital, where the regional government and its central administration are located, remained Catanzaro; but the regional assembly was moved to and now meets in Reggio Calabria.

The fact that Apulia and Calabria seemed, in Putnam’s analysis, to be the worst-governed regions may, in part, be due to the way nation al legislators disregarded historic borders and regional identities and imposed what, from the perspective of ordinary people in Capitanata and Crotone, appeared to be one more consolidated — and distant — layer of government between localities, the provincial field services of the national system of public administration and Rome itself.8 Put nam’s evaluation of the institutional performance in Apulia and Cal abria may have coincided with the constituency evaluation there (Put nam 1993, 76—8 i), but the criteria for the constituency evaluation may be grounded in an interpretative scheme that Putnam and his collabo rators did not appear to have seriously explored. By paying little or no attention to the riots of Reggio Calabria and to the resultant regional government arrangements, Putnam misidentified Reggio Calabria as the regional capital when he said that “for many southerners ... being ruled from Ban or Reggio Calabnia is not much better than being ruled from Rome” (Putnam 1993, More importantly, he missed an opportunity to explore the suggestion advanced earlier by some Italian analysts — that the way the Calabrian regional experiment took effect had a negative impact on, or slowed down, its legislative performance (see Amato et al. 1975, 41).

The present regions are, then, in part historic entities and in part arbitrary administrative contrivances — a point already alluded to in chapter . This is to say that the design principles of regional govern ment did not embody similar meanings everywhere and thus the cre ation of regional government cannot be reasonably construed as con stituting a single, uniform political experiment across Italy.

This conclusion, which leaves no pillars in Putnam’s analysis stand ing, would not have surprised many nineteenth-century publicists — from Cattaneo in the north to Napoleone Colajanni and Edoardo Pan tano in the south — who took part in or followed the regionalist debate between i86o and 1945 (see Ganci 1973; Ruffilli 1971). As we saw in

chapters 2—4, these analysts did not assume that the extension of rep resentative institutions built on a logic of parliamentary sovereignty could be equated with self-government; they, in fact, anticipated that central government decentralization, far from being a neutral policy instrument, would be a political contrivance more sensitive to the demands of the governing classes than to the regional diversities of Italy. This point was made by Cattaneo in the i86os. About thirty years later Colajanni and Pantano amplified it, likening proposals to decentralize central government authority to attempts to shorten the handle of the hammer when the hammer of centralized government and administration itself was the problem. The southern analysts may have been too pessimistic in their predictions, but Putnam imperiled his own experiment by not profiting from the rich regionalist debate in Italy since i86o.

CONCLUSION

There is no question that Robert Putnam has written a powerful book. The widespread attention the book and the author have received in the media, among policy makers, and in academic circles has contributed to fostering a positive image of contemporary Italian politics and, more generally, has drawn attention to the importance that community and associational life can make in the politics of everyday life. At the same time, Putnam’s work has given renewed standing to the culturalist explanation offered by Banfield more than forty years ago and has con tributed to the resurgence of culturalist explanations of differential government performance more generally. Unfortunately, like Ban- field’s, Putnam’s explanation of Italian regional government perfor mance does not withstand close inspection. His analysis advanced a strong argument for path dependence and culturalist explanation but, as I have shown, also accentuated their fatal shortcomings.

The conclusions of this chapter are threefold. First, Putnam’s model reminds us that history matters, and then proceeds to mess up how, when, and why it matters. A path dependence forma mentis can lead, and has led, to a caricature of the north and the south and to the neglect of nuances in both. Second, Putnam’s explanatory scheme led him to draw the wrong conclusions from history and the regional experiment. I have shown that north-south differences are not really comparable unless we take into account the differential impact of gov ernmental action, something which Putnam was prevented from doing by the explanatory scheme he uses. Third, the transitions and ruptures I have sketched in the growth of governmental institutions since the eighteenth century point to the constraints on development that have a

238 Why People Are Not Path Dependently Doomed

structure other than path dependence. Crafting institutions for good government was not as determined and closed-ended a process as Put nam suggested. The transitions and ruptures support the argument that the continuing interplay of economic and political factors at the local, regional, and national levels has far more profound implications for development (or inertia) than any particular path-dependent structure.

Serious flaws thus disable Making Democracy Work both from mak ing sense of the Italian regional experiment and from being a classic in comparative politics research. As we unlearn the lessons taught by the resurgence of culturalist explanations, we are challenged to provide less flawed accounts of how history, culture, institutions, and individ uals come together to matter. Cattaneo’s lifelong intellectual struggle and Putnam’s own twenty-year poking around the regions of Italy sug gest that the task is not an easy one. The search for good government surveyed in this book shows that the struggle is still worthwhile, no matter how elusive the dependent variable of good government turns out to be. The elusiveness of that variable offers reflections for the con cluding chapter.

CONCLUSION

io Good Government: The Elusive Dependent Variable

The preceding chapters have sought to construct an argument for rejecting the paradox of rational individuals and irrational society in contemporary Italian politics, and consequently for thinking different ly about poor government performance. The argument was developed through an empirically grounded examination of four distinct but interconnected dimensions of the “paradox of Italy,” involving differ ent levels of analysis. The study attempted to provide answers to the following questions: What constitutional knowledge was available during the Risorgimento and informed the creation of the Italian state? What institutional learning shaped the reiteration of constitutional choice and design in 1946, and how did the system work at the local level? How can the government war on crime be seen as a fight for good government? What is wrong with the accepted view that some parts of Italy have been culturally or path dependently doomed to bad government?

This book shows that crafting institutions of good government can — and does — produce antithetical and counterintentional results. While the chapters in each part convey specific and multidimensional aspects, the overall argument can be summarized as follows: Italian politics should not be understood as some kind of sinkhole of misgovernment and corruption, but as a laboratory of what a search for good govern ment can generate, or an illustration of why good government remains such an elusive dependent variable. The rest of this chapter summarizes the principal conclusions of the study and their implications for the politics of reform in the post-1992 period, then extends those implica