Do Amoral Familism and Political Distrust Really Affect North–South Differences in Italy?

Abstract

Especially in southern Italy, Banfield’s amoral familism is considered an obstacle to the formation of associations and growth of political participation. This article discusses Banfield’s concept, showing that it has been vulgarized merely as familism and, in particular, demonstrates that Banfield intended amoral familism to be understood in terms of political distrust. We investigated whether amoral familism or political distrust, operationalized as an individual difference variable, mediated the relationships between personality traits, personal values, and conventional and unconventional political acts, controlling for differences in political attitude. We recruited 405 participants, distributed across north, central, and southern Italy, to complete a questionnaire on political participation that also assessed Big Five personality factors, values, sociability and political attitude (expertise, interest, self-efficacy), and a new scale assessing amoral familism as a form of political distrust. Regression analyses were used to identify the best predictors of political acts, then structural equation modeling was used to test a model of political participation. Like political attitudes, familism mediated the relationships between personality traits, especially “openness to experience” and “taking conventional and unconventional political acts.” However, our data do not confirm the stereotype that northern and southern Italians differ in their tendency to amoral familism as defined by Banfield.