Regional government quality tracks civic traditions rooted in the eleventh century

Evidence

What could account for these stark differences in quality of government? Some seemingly obvious answers turned out to be irrelevant. Government organization was too similar from region to region for that to explain the contrasts in performance. Party politics or ideology made little difference. Affluence and prosperity had no direct effect. Social stability or political harmony or population movements were not the key. None of these factors was correlated with good government as we had anticipated. Instead the best predictor is one that Alexis de Tocqueville might have expected. Strong traditions of civic engage-ment—voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and literary circles, Lions Clubs, and soccer clubs—were the hallmarks of a successful region. … The historical roots of the civic community are astonishingly deep. Enduring traditions of civic involvement and social solidarity can be traced back nearly a millennium to the eleventh century, when communal republics were established in places like Florence, Bologna, and Genoa, exactly the communities that today enjoy civic engagement and successful government. At the core of this civic heritage are rich networks of organized reciprocity and civic solidarity—guilds, religious fraternities, and tower societies for self-defense in the medieval communes; cooperatives, mutual aid societies, neighborhood associations, and choral societies in the twentieth century. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1207

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that institutional performance in 1970s Italy is best predicted by civic habits traceable to eleventh-century communal republics is a genuinely stunning durability-of-culture result that resists easy summary.
• XREF: Echoes Putnam’s own ‘Making Democracy Work’ and connects to Guiso-Sapienza-Zingales on the persistence of Italian civic capital across centuries.