The Search for Good Government: Understanding the Paradox of Italian Democracy. By Filippo Sabetti. Montreal: McGill–Queens University Press, 2000. 288p. $34.95.

Extract

Filippo Sabetti has written an important book, not just for specialists in Italian politics, but also for those more generally interested in comparative politics. Poor government performance has often been associated with the Italian state, so much so that foreign scholars often used Italy as an ideal locale to probe the seminal causes of political pathology. Edward Banfield's (1958) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, for example, attributed poor political performance to the particular beliefs and attitudes of Italians, to an inadequate moral basis he identified as “amoral familism.” The village Banfield studied, Chiaromonte (which he called Montegrano), soon became a model for “backward societies” in the comparative literature and later was woven into game theoretic concerns, such as the tragedy of the commons and the prisoner's dilemma. Banfield's “culturalist” approach was later refined in Robert Putnam's (1993) Making Democracy Work. Rather than condemning all Italy to pathological status, as Banfield's Montegrano writ large, Putnam compared the “unsuccessful” South with the civic-minded North, where a density of associations and an abundance of “social capital” not only made “democracy work,” but also contributed to economic prosperity. Putnam later extended this analysis of associability and social capital to the United States, most famously in his work on “bowling alone.”