Social actors and social ties in multiple modernity: Familism and social change in the South of Italy

This paper focuses on relationships between community ties and social change, highlighting family bonds in the South of Italy. We interrogate major results of contemporary research on political familism and its interconnections with political clientelism. The category of political familism highlights the presence of family chains within political parties, hence in the selection of the political class and within the bureaucratic sector. We argue that, in some contexts, the crisis of political parties in Italy and specific forms of personalisation of power are accompanied by the strengthening of political familism, since family ties still constitute a strategic resource for electoral and political success. Furthermore, we highlight firstly those factors which have favoured the persistence of familism, both in the private and in the public spheres, and subsequently some factors indicating crisis or change in the familistic model, in addition to its multiple ambivalences.

A major perspective for exploring characteristics and changes among social relationships and social ties consists in analysing the relations between the social subject, the community, and the society. This analysis has preoccupied, from different perspectives, both classical and contemporary sociologists. In general, dichotomous interpretations can be distinguished from those which take into consideration co-existences, reciprocal influences and interdependencies in terms of functions and values. In the seventies of the last century, comparative research on processes of modernisation (carried out, for example, by Einsenstadt, Roniger or Berger) highlighted how dichotomous approaches to the explanation of social changes were inadequate and often misleading, since they asserted a unique paradigm for processes of change and thus hypothesised a univocal and linear path, irreducibly opposing tradition and modernity, individual and community, rationality and emotions. As a result, the extraordinary (and sometimes contrasting) variety of processes of social and political change which actually take place, in addition to the extraordinary variety of social, religious, economic, and political institutions and of the social bonds built or re-defined in relation to these institutions, were ignored or underestimated.

Subsequent decades’ investigations into the internationalisation and globalisation of social processes do not contradict what these inquiries into multiple modernisation have taught. On the contrary, in our view, they have emphasised even more strongly the contributions of this approach, if anything, enriching it with new examples of ‘hybridisation’ of social change, for example, at the ‘macro’ level, by China, India, Brazil, and at the ‘micro’ level, by the ‘desire for community’ (Bauman, 2001) which affects Western societies in many respects.

Within this framework, we critically explore salient results of research, among it our own, carried out in the South of Italy, in particular in Calabria, over several decades. Much of this research belongs to the ‘community studies’ approach to analysing social change. By this expression, we refer to research which, going beyond dichotomous approaches, tries to explain how communities, their members and the societies in question are changed and continue to change along a path which partly involves negotiation and is partly conflictual, and which has both exogenous and endogenous origins.

In particular, we focus attention on ‘familism’, defined in terms of processes referable to ‘pervasive’ particularism, which are centred on family and composed of cultural and social practices exercised through the ties of kinship and family relationships, and which have become the fulcrum of the entire social system. We refer here to families and kinships that are able to branch into (almost) all social ambits, explicitly or implicitly, according to perceived needs and opportunities; this is a system that goes beyond the affective, economic, educational, and cultural dimensions proper to family relationships in order to become a fundamental element of the regulation of social life, in its political, institutional, professional, and economic dimensions and therefore in the legitimation of leadership. Ginsborg (1998) defines familism as a relationship between the family, civic society, and the state, in which values and interests pertaining to family are opposed to other distinguishing features which characterise a society as democratic.

It is worth highlighting that familism affects Italy in general and that it assumes different forms. Economic familism can be noted in the North of Italy. In the North-East, since the 1970s, the success of networks of small- and medium-sized enterprises is due among other things to the fact that they are both family enterprises and based on the extended family (Bagnasco, 1977; Paci, 1980; Piselli, 2006). In the North-West, in contrast, the success of large enterprises and thus of ‘big family’ capitalism can be associated with the presence of prominent families (such as the Agnelli, Pirelli, or Marzotto families). Furthermore, in Italy, the influence of the family can also be analysed in relation to the professions: ‘professional familism’ tends to reduce social mobility (Cobalti & Schizzerotto, 1994), increasing the importance of relational resources based on the family and kinship chains rather than personal commitment to self-realisation.

In this paper, we interrogate a particular form of familism, political familism, which is highly salient in the South of Italy. We argue that, in some contexts, such as Southern Italian regions and cities, the current crisis of political parties and a sequence of forms of personalisation of power (phenomena with considerable significance for Western democracies) go along with the strengthening of political familism. In fact, kinship ties and their use can still constitute a strategic resource for political and electoral success (especially at a time when other tools for achieving political consensus are becoming less efficacious).

In the following sections, we initially describe the theoretical background of key studies carried out in the South of Italy, analysing them in terms both of key categories and of the academic debates to which they gave rise. After that, we highlight the most important results of these investigations and finally, we emphasise the main questions left open, which, in our view, are in part specific to the South of Italy and in part reflect wider questions related to the most recent trends affecting social bonds in contemporary Western societies.

A putative opposition between community and society has been employed in many studies on modernisation, one which considers the characteristics of traditional societies incompatible with those of modern ones and argues that the latter represent an obstacle to development. Such a dichotomy between the particularistic community and the universalistic society has not infrequently been employed in research on the South of Italy, in particular in the work of Banfield (1958), which makes use of a rigid interpretation of Parsons’s ‘pattern variables’, especially of the dichotomy between particularism and universalism.

Banfield argues that, in the community of Montegrano, social bonds are limited to the nuclear family, whose behaviours are inspired by the ethos of amoral familism. His central thesis is based on the idea that social actors here behave according to the implicit or explicit rule (which adds up to an ethos, or an ethical principle, that can be perceived from an anthropological perspective): ‘Maximise the material short-run advantage of my nuclear family; assume that others will do likewise.’ The term ‘amoral’ does not indicate the absence of morals tout court. According to Banfield, morals (the distinction between what is good and what is not) exist only within the family, which, in Montegrano, constitutes the only extant level of social aggregation. The ethos of amoral familism, as a cultural characteristic rooted in the ideas and behaviours of Montegrano’s inhabitants, undermines the formation of any social bonds wider than the familial ones and thus precludes the possibility of cooperation. It produces social fragmentation and the absence of social cohesion. In turn, this lack of social cohesion explains the absence of development. Amoral familism, therefore, undermines development and constitutes an obstacle to the process of change.

Banfield’s research opened up an important debate (Bagnasco, 2006) and still represents an important contribution to studies on the South of Italy. It highlights some features and behaviours that can still be recognised in Southern Italian social contexts. It is also true, however, that this work has received considerable criticism. In this paper, we do not focus on systematically reviewing these criticisms; instead, we explore a research direction which tends to overcome the opposition between community and social change, according to which community relations undermine modernisation. Furthermore, this approach has the effect of highlighting significant elements which characterise social bonds and modernisation in the South of Italy.

In the following sections, we discuss the main results of some research which partially contradict Banfield’s thesis. In this sense, they highlight two important aspects. The first concerns the existence of kinship networks, and thus the existence of social bonds beyond the immediate nuclear family. The second concerns processes of change and their specific direction in the South of Italy, which exhibit significant differences in comparison to the typical model of Western modernisation. Traditional family and kinship networks, in fact, have been de-structured and re-structured, affecting the forms taken by social change and becoming the fulcrum for change processes.

The concept of amoral familism that was developed by Banfield in the 1950s was taken into consideration by Putnam (1993) in the 1990s. Putnam’s analysis is based on the concept of social capital defined in terms of civicness (values, norms, associations, institutions, which support the civic commitment characterised by reciprocal solidarity and trust). He argues that the economic and political underdevelopment of the Southern Italian regions originates in an incapacity to constitute associations for pursuing the common good (as Banfield claimed), an incapacity reproduced through long-term socialisation processes. According to Putnam, rather than amoral familism, the variable which explains the low institutional success of regional governments is lack of social capital. For this reason, he argues, the Southern Italian regions, characterised by a weak civic tradition and a lack of social capital, are marked by unsuccessful governments and low institutional performance.

The work of Putnam too has been long debated (e.g. Ferragina, 2010; Trigilia, 2001). It represents a culturalist approach to the explanation of local development, highlighting the role of cultural variables within development processes. However, as several scholars underline, it tends to underestimate the role of political factors and the processes of interdependency between cultural conditions, political features, and economic performance (Bagnasco, 1994; Raniolo, 2016). In particular, Trigilia (2005, 2012), analysing the main academic theories concerning the developmental deficit in the South of Italy in comparison to the North, has proposed an interpretation emphasising both the role of cultural factors and the role of local and national politics. The reciprocal influences between a weak civic culture and local and central politics (where political consensus is based on the distribution of particularistic advantages) generate a vicious circle. In fact, on the one hand, the weakness of the civic culture (measured by several indicators, such as low levels of associationism, low interpersonal and institutional trust, low political participation, and a social network limited to family and kinship) influences local development. On the other, politics itself (which is based on clientelistic mechanisms and money transfers within the welfare-state assistential mechanisms) contributes to maintaining low levels of social capital. In turn, the low level of civicness obstructs the process of political renewal. According to Trigilia, this means that the weak civic culture originates in part from the (mal-)functioning of politics, which helps to undermine social capital or at least does not promote it. Clientelism, dependence on welfare-state transfers and corruption certainly do not foster a culture based on respect for the rules.

In this section, we approach a number of studies concerning change among family and institutional relationships in the South of Italy which can be situated within the theoretical and interpretative model of multiple modernity (Eisenstadt, 2000, 2003), although they do not always refer to it explicitly.

Models related to structural–functionalist theory, to stages of development (Rostow, 1962), or to Parsons’ pattern variables (1937, 1951), on the one hand, highlight the delays that can be attributed to the South of Italy, but, on the other, fail to enhance comprehension of the interrelationship between tradition and modernity, or between forms of particularism and forms of universalism. In respect of familism, they do not explain how the relevance of the family system can be combined both with indicators of modernisation (such as consumption or education) and, at the same time, with forms of resistance towards modernisation (such as weak industrialisation or legality) (Mutti, 1991).

The theoretical framework of studies which, in our view, better explain the characteristics shown by processes of change in the South of Italy is the model of multiple modernity (Eisenstadt, 1990), according to which:

1. the process of modernisation presents both common characteristics and variable features, according to the specific contexts concerned; in each process, it is possible to observe a specific interaction between different factors, which may be exogenous or endogenous;

2. the crystallisation of distinct modernities depends on three orders of factors: the characteristics of social structures (the social division of labour and distribution of resources); the characteristics of major social and political elites; and the dominant cultural and cognitive orders;

3. ‘modernisation’ itself could be read as a specific reaction to challenges to modernity, in terms of both a revision of traditional elements and a selective incorporation of elements of modernity.

In relation to comparisons between processes of modernisation and interactions between the different global regions, as Jedlowski (2013) and Martinelli (2011) emphasise, we should also note the complementary perspective taken by Wallerstein (1974), which pays attention to the plurality of processes of modernity, since they arise differently in central, peripheral and semi-peripheral regions, producing and reproducing differences in a fashion that consistently reflects inequalities between and among these regions.

As mentioned above, the South of Italy can be analysed, with due methodological prudence, as one case of multiple modernity. It has deeply changed over time and is nowadays an internally differentiated context. Cities have grown, in both urban and demographic terms; inhabitants’ incomes and patterns of consumption have risen, as have levels of education; overall life conditions have improved. Changes in the South of Italy can also be read through the condition of women, since their emancipation assumes the value of a civil and social right in respect of heightened personal autonomy across a variety of ambits of existence, both private and public, mainly within education and the job market (Siebert, 1999). Nevertheless, the South is still a territorial context affected by significant social, economic, and political problems: the distance between the North and the South of Italy persists and, in some respects, it has increased (Cersosimo & Nisticò, 2013).

The process of change in the South of Italy, in comparison to the Western model, presents some specificities. Modernisation took place, in many areas and regions, without industrialisation (or with scant and limited industrialisation) (Catanzaro, 1989) and without the classes and the work cultures related to it (Signorelli, 1989). The South of Italy shifted directly from the primary to the tertiary sector, in particular, a public sector strongly dependent on public expenditures. In the unitary State, social and territorial integration took place mainly through public employment and welfare-state transfers. Local capacities for development are weak (Trigilia, 1992) and the economy is largely dependent on politics, in that political influence tends to determine how resources are allocated (see below; also Cersosimo, 1991; Costabile, 2009).

Social ties have been deeply transformed, but here, change has not occurred according to the classical model of modernisation. Indeed, in Southern Italian regions, social bonds differ from those characteristic of societies in which industrialisation gave rise to: class cultures and relations, associations and conflict related to industry. These Southern Italian bonds include familism and, in particular, political familism. In modern societies, family and kinships bonds tend to be privatised, performing functions concerning the private sphere. On the contrary, in the South of Italy, family and kinship networks do not pertain to the private sphere alone but also to public and institutional ones; in other words, they do not only enact private functions but also other functions which in modern societies are usually executed by various institutional structures: the functions of political legitimation, distribution of resources, and social integration among the different strata of the population. Hence, politics is extensively pervaded by family and kinship relationships. The category of political familism – as the work of Piselli (1981) shows – highlights the presence of family chains within political parties, thus in the selection of the political class and within the institutional–bureaucratic sector. Family represents the central element of the social and political system and it constitutes the main channel for the construction and transmission of power.

Furthermore, as we will show, familism has not been an obstacle to modernisation, rather it has constituted a modality of becoming modern and of experiencing modernity, connected to a particular utilisation of kinship and family relationships. This has conditioned and oriented the process of modernisation through the prevalence of particularistic constraints.

In addition to familism, the category of clientelism is frequently employed for explaining the characteristics of modernisation in Southern Italian contexts. It is a particularistic relationship, springing up everywhere from economic to political exchanges (Eisenstadt & Lemarchand, 1981; Eisenstadt & Roniger, 1984), and, in the South of Italy, it is tied to familism. In respect of the deep-rootedness of clientelism after the Second World War, several studies highlight the weakness of political associationism and the clientelistic characteristics of aspects of political life in Southern Italy (Catanzaro, 1989; Fantozzi, 1993). In contrast, researches on Central-Northern Italy show different characteristics associated with regions where political subcultures (especially the ‘red’ and the ‘white’ ones) had taken deep root. In these cases, for example, members of associations were chosen largely based on their allegiance to particular ideological positions.

As already mentioned, during the 1980s, in a dialectical comparison with the work of Banfield, a series of research projects on the changes in Southern Italy were undertaken, including some important community research in Calabria (Arrighi & Piselli, 1985; Piselli, 1981), followed by other works which focused attention on familism and political clientelism.

Piselli (1981) in particular analysed processes of change affecting some villages in Calabria. The most representative case concerns Altopiano, a small community in which she carried out an in-depth analysis of the social system, using a historical perspective. This author shows how, with modernity, the family and kinship chains of the rural traditional society were initially de-structured and then re-structured around public institutions.

Altopiano was a small rural community based on a subsistence economy. The basic social unit was constituted by the nuclear or partially extended family, but there were also significant relationships of solidarity and cooperation between families. In contrast with the work of Banfield, Piselli’s research shows how the traditional social system was not disaggregated nor characterised by the absence of extra-family relationships of reciprocity, but was instead marked by solidarity networks extending beyond the nuclear family, and by factors of integration and cohesion that were consistent among kinships, neighbourhood relationships, friendships, clientelistic relationships, and ‘comparaggio’ – the ‘godfather’ relationship.

In contrast to what Banfield saw as the absence, indeed, the impossibility of transformation for the community of Montegrano, Piselli’s research extends a detailed appreciation to the process of historical change that involved the community of Altopiano, through changes in the economic system, with the penetration of a monetary economy and the development of the tertiary sector, and through the disaggregation and re-structuration of family and kinship networks in the political–institutional sphere. Thus, while Banfield’s work implies an opposition between tradition and modernity, Piselli’s research demonstrates the mutual interpermeation between forms of continuity and forms of change.

Piselli employs the term ‘great transformation’, referring to the work of Polany (1944), to indicate the shift from

The disaggregation of the traditional production structures did not correspond to the disappearance of traditional family and kinship structures on which the former had been based. The traditional family and kinship relationships had the capacity to adapt to transformation, to assume new functions and to become the central element of the new organisation of political life. The re-composition of family and kinship aggregations within political parties took place according to different modalities:

• Invasive families occupy a given political party until they are among the most influential groups within it, in order to control the network for distributing resources it controls.

• Mobile or transformist families, after having obtained their share of resources, a particular political party can distribute, change party in order to obtain further advantages.

• Pervasive families have family representatives in all the political parties in the spectrum and thus control local political life and the entire redistributive chain. They are present in the main political parties and also in the organisations related to them; they have representatives within the trade unions too, and they establish relationships with the members of the Church; thus, they tend to extend their network of influence into local, regional, and national levels.

• Client families are subaltern families which are not registered with any political party, neither do they officially vote for one in particular, but they sell their votes to a party or to a candidate (Piselli, 1981).

Political parties are used as modern tools of appropriation and privatisation, manipulating and transforming their proper functions of interests, diffusion of information, and so on (Arrighi & Piselli, 1985).

Piselli shows too how individuals tend to use kinship and family bonds as the most powerful available tool for integrating themselves into modern society. The system of kinship no longer constitutes a coherent set of norms which regulate individual action, and to that extent is no longer a constraining structure. On the contrary, the ‘open’ network of kinship is an instrument of manipulation used by individuals for strengthening their position in the job market, or for increasing their prestige or their power. This kind of manipulation has not weakened the traditional family network and nor has it constituted a factor of disaggregation, but it represents a new source of social cohesion between groups.

The research critically reviewed here highlights how mechanisms of social cohesion depend on political decisions and redistributive flows at national level. The operations of redistribution, in terms of agrarian reform, cooperatives, subsidies, or contracts, have permitted power to spread and be exercised everywhere in the population, even down to the smallest nucleus of the social body (often, however, leaving those who are excluded with little choice but to emigrate). The political class, after having ensured for themselves and their families the largest portion of the available resources and access to the best positions, then use the channels of redistribution to secure the basis of political consensus through widespread clientelist action.

Political clientelism (Eisenstadt & Lemarchand, 1981; Eisenstadt & Roniger, 1984; Graziano, 1980) has for a long time constituted an aspect of social regulation, through the particularistic distribution of advantages. The main ambits of clientelist reproduction have been, on the one hand, family, kinship and friendship and, on the other, political parties and the State. Clientelism has manipulated community relationships, which became functional for achieving particularistic advantages or for attaining prestigious positions. At the same time, the objectives and functioning of institutions were also manipulated, diminishing their universalistic contents.

Fantozzi (1993) shows how, over time, clientelism has been transformative. He distinguishes three forms of clientelism:

1. familistic-popular clientelism: a patron ensures protection to his clients and to their families, in exchange for votes and loyalty;

2. network clientelism: a patron establishes relationships with those who occupy strategic roles within political, economical and religious institutions, exchanging their support for favours in terms of votes.

3. category clientelism: patrons establish relationships with groups and associations, exchanging benefits and advantages for such groups for the electoral support of all their members, in addition to the support deriving from the influence of those groups in those parts of the society in which they are active.

With the decrease in public resources stemming from changes in national policies for the South of Italy and the crisis of the welfare state, clientelism has progressively lost its function of social integration for the lower strata of society. The relationship between patron and client then came to assume the form of a lobby composed of political, bureaucratic, professional elites and large enterprises, entrepreneurs, and other speculative groups. The relationship between the family and clientelism changed, since the role of familistic-popular clientelism decreased (thus excluding the lower strata of the population), while the influence of category clientelism and the lobbies has increased.

These transformations have different causes. One explanation concerns the decrease in economic resources due to changes in national policies for the South of Italy. In the 1980s, the logic of widespread monetary transfers was replaced by the concentration of monetary flows for projects. This change provided advantages for the higher social classes, thanks to their economic and professional resources and to their political and bureaucratic networks. The lower strata of the population, to the contrary, have been progressively marginalised from the distribution of advantages related to these investments. The crisis of the welfare state too has contributed to the transformation of familistic-popular clientelism, through which, as we have emphasised, the lower strata of population were formerly able to benefit from the distribution of advantages.

Within this tradition of studies on the South of Italy, we would like to explore the main results of a case study¹ we first carried out in the 1990s (Costabile, 1996) and further developed in the early years of this century (Costabile, 2009). It focuses on the reproduction of political power in the Calabrian town of Cosenza between 1944 and 2006.

In this case too, the process of modernisation took place through family networks, since family and kinship were the main sources of traditional legitimation in the process of building the new institutional system, in course of the shift from the fascist regime to the democratic State. In this context, the family-political elites chose public institutions as the privileged arena in which to compete and reproduce their influence and status, using the capacities and resources available to them.

The case study highlights the main characteristics of these family systems: they comprised endogamic unions, multilinear kinship networks (comprehending the relatives of both wives and husbands) and patrilinear criteria for succession. Strategies used within this political-family elite focused on two arenas: the first was the occupation of the mass political parties and of the administrative and representative institutions; the second was mediation between the periphery and the national political centre in order to obtain monetary transfers. Political parties assumed the form of catch-all parties (Kirchheimer, 1979), characterised by weak ideologies and organisation, in order to be functional for occupation by families and clientelistic relationships. The resulting political representation permitted the families in question to reach the political centre and to impact on conditions in the periphery. Especially in national Parliamentary elections between 1946 and 1979, politicians in Cosenza often obtained great success within the most important national parties (DC (the Christian Democrats), PSI (the Italian Socialist Party), and PCI – the Italian Communist Party). Their main resources for success were an extended family network together with personal ability and personal charisma, which led to their occupation of significant roles in the national parties and in national government. These families’ reproduction of their power was based on clientelist mechanisms. In turn, these mechanisms were possible, thanks to resources obtained from the central levels of the State, redistributed in terms of employment, licenses, and subsidies. In other words, they presupposed State provision of a high level of public expenditure.

The most important political family in Cosenza is the Mancini family, which has occupied political roles for generations. Pietro Mancini senior was a lawyer with considerable status and influence in urban society. He was a member of the Italian Parliament from 1921 to 1926; in 1943, he became Prefect of Cosenza, then in 1944, he became a Minister in the Italian government. In 1948, he became a member of the Italian Senate, supporting the Italian Socialist Party. Giacomo Mancini senior was Pietro Mancini’s son, and a member of the PSI from 1948 to 1992. For a considerable period, he occupied the position of Minister, and was also the secretary of the PSI. From 1985 to 1986, he was mayor of the city of Cosenza, and again from 1993 until 2002. Pietro Mancini junior was his son. Pietro Mancini junior was mayor of the city from 1990 to 1991. Finally, Giacomo Mancini junior (Pietro Mancini’s son, the grandson of Giacomo Mancini senior) became a member of the regional council in 1992, becoming a member of the national parliament from 2001 to 2008^, in a political party in the left-wing coalition. He then became a member of the regional council (assessor) with Forza Italia; this represented a case of political transformism – moving from one political party to another. Mancini was not elected at the last regional elections; however, he took part in the local political elections with, again, a left-wing political grouping.

The most recent trends show interesting empirical evidence about the relationship between familism and clientelism. As Ginsborg (2003) highlights, it is worth analytically exploring these connections in order to analyse when they overlap and when they are distinct. Clientelism can in fact be tied mainly to the strength of some political party (subsequently introducing familistic factors); it can be based on the charismatic qualities and success of a particular political leader; or it can be subordinated to familistic logics.

In this regard, the case study examined here highlights how familism can constitute the regulative element in political clientelism. When this happens, we can observe how the selection of top leaders in political–clientelistic systems is connected to the production and re-production of familistic interests and logics. Here, clientelistic relationships operate at low and mass level, while family and kinship ties act at the top level and take effect as far as cultural legitimation is concerned.

Mainly during recent decades, in a period characterised by crises in collective ideologies, in political militancy and in the model of the mass political party typical of the 1900s, family networks can represent, more strongly than in the past, an important anchorage in organisational and cultural terms, bringing about the creation of a relatively solid and durable area of consensus. This area can be even more important if we take into consideration the increasing rate of political apathy and voter abstention and the reduction of spaces for clientelism that ensues from the significant contraction of public expenditure.

According to the classical model, political clientelism is anchored by the political party and its associations, in addition to qualities of political leaders and their kinship network. But, to the contrary, the case of Cosenza shows how the political party, membership of which is necessary even for obtaining trust within and access to local and national institutions, can be used, at the local level, as a tool that is functional to professional and family strategies. This gives it less intrinsic importance within decision-making processes and renders it subordinate to the dominance of family and professional power (Costabile, 2009).

A convincing example is represented by the local elections of Cosenza in 1993, after Tangentopoli and the crisis of the party system of the First Republic. During this crisis, over half the members of the Italian Parliament had been investigated for corruption, and several hundred local councils had had to be dissolved; processes like these, together with other causes including the crisis in political ideologies, resulted in the collapse of the traditional political parties. Within the subsequent new political context, in the absence of traditional political parties, the most influential political families of the town participated directly in political competition, without the mediation of the mass (clientelist) parties. In Cosenza’s local competition for the position of mayor, there participated the following: the son of the ex-podestà and fascist senator (representing the right), the above-mentioned socialist minister (son of a minister and father of the ex-mayor of the town in which he was standing – successfully as it transpired – for election), a socialist regional council member (representing a family network rooted among local inhabitants and representing the left) and a lawyer (from a family of lawyers representing the central political area).

These trends re-established the centrality of familistic factors in Calabria, within the new and confused Italian post-Tangentopoli political scenery. They were confirmed too in other local political contests (such as those in Crotone and in other Calabrian towns and in subsequent elections). In fact, for example in Cosenza, a new political family became very influential through two brothers, one of whom was a member of the national parliament and the other who was reconfirmed, in 2016, in his position of mayor (both were members of Forza Italia).

Therefore, taking into consideration Ginsborg’s insight (2003), in order to analyse the relationship between familisms and clientelism, a first indication emerging from our case study shows the following. Within the crisis of traditional political clientelism, directly connected with the political parties, political familism, at the local level, can still obtain legitimacy and consensus. Furthermore, the forms of personalisation and privatisation of politics now significant in contemporary Western democracies actually accord more strength to political familism.

Converging with these trends, a further aspect strengthening political familism concerns its relationships with forms of neopatrimonalism that are particularly widespread in the South of Italy (Coco, 2015). Both the private use of public resources as personal goods and the use of politics as family goods represent forms of power privatisation. We are here referring to the entire range of phenomena that concern the personal use of public and private administrative resources by those who hold positions of power in order to gain particularistic advantages, which remain widespread within political and economic contexts, in public and private administrations and in professional sectors (Coco & Fantozzi, 2012).

Furthermore, the strength of family networks in the construction of political power and consensus is connected to the phenomenon of transformism specific to the Italian political system. This is defined as the transfer from one political coalition to another, both during a legislature or when there are new elections. In fact, political families, operating within forms of particularistic consensus and legitimation, can now justify changes of political party (or coalition) more easily than in the past, when the obligation of loyalty to an ideological mass party limited political families’ lack of scruple. The case study here has referred to the family of the socialist ex-national Minister who was elected as mayor of Cosenza in 1993 (succeeding his son), which is a further example. The most recent successor in this political family was elected as member of the national parliament in 2001, with the PDS. In 2006, he was re-elected, while, in 2008, he lost the elections (standing for the left-wing party). In 2009, he was a candidate in the central-right coalition for the European election and in 2010, he became assessor of the central-right regional government of Calabria. During the last local political elections, in 2016, he again stood for election, on behalf of a left-wing political party.

Finally, family relationships are strong in criminal organisations too (Sciarrone, 2009). Research shows how the ’Ndrangheta in particular has a strong family dimension and how its cohesion is based on the strength of ‘blood bonds.’ The mafia enterprises, which possess globally significant financial capital and which control a large part of the Southern Italian regions as well as having extended their influence into Northern regions, are based on family clans and networks (Paoli, 2000).

It is worth noting that the South of Italy is not a homogeneous context but is internally diverse; the findings of the research explored here are not exhaustive of this variety. However, their results and conclusions show aspects common to many contexts, and they are confirmed by several studies carried out in different regions and cities.² In particular, these investigations emphasise the frequent interrelationship in different local social terrains between politics and family and kinship mechanisms of political power reproduction.

In this section, on the basis of the research findings examined here, we highlight firstly those factors which, in the Southern Italian regions, have favoured the rootedness of familism, both in the private and in the public sphere, and subsequently the factors inducing crisis or change in the familistic model, in addition to the several ambivalences which it presents. It is worth noting that the complexity of the theme and in particular the complexity of the dynamics between individuals, community and society do not permit us to reach univocal theoretical conclusions. This is even truer if we observe both the ambivalences of the phenomena in question and the changes affecting social bonds in a society that can in itself be defined as familistic.

In detail, we can indicate four factors favouring familism here. The first concerns the religious prerequisites of modernisation, and in particular, the centrality of family in the Catholic religion, which has Italy as its fulcrum. Catholicism in fact considers the family as a value in itself and as a specific model around which to organise social life. In Italy, there exists a formal separation between Church and State, defined by the Lateran Treaty in 1929 and integrated into the Italian Constitution of 1949. However, the Catholic Church, officially excluded from public life, has continued to permeate it, mainly through the means of kinship and family ties, their values, and their functions. The Catholic religion penetrates society, including its public and political dimensions, through its models of family education and of socialisation. The family is a privileged channel for the penetration of religion into the secular public sphere, and, for this reason, it has assumed connotations of sacredness, since it has been legitimated by religion itself. Thus, the Catholic religion constitutes a prerequisite for the familistic model in the modernisation process.

Secondly, family, through processes of internal national migration and kinships ties which have become widespread across the country, constitutes a factor of national unification, interconnecting the Northern with the Southern regions. Because of this, it has become a fundamental trait in the Italian identity (Galli della Loggia, 1998).

Thirdly, a further feature which favours familism is the flexibility of family relationships, their adaptive capacity in connection with interpersonal relationships which are not formalised into institutional roles. This feature has enabled the family to penetrate the public bureaucracies and professions with entire family nuclei and kinship ties. The family has become a useful resource for individuals in their lives, mostly in public and professional ambits.

Another, fourth factor, specifically political, concerns the asymmetric model of Italian industrialisation, with its differential development of production across the national territory to the disadvantage of the South, as well as the roles of public expenditure and of the welfare state, which has assumed ‘particularistic-clientelist’ characteristics. The clientelist system based on subsidies has been able to compensate to some extent for the economic gap between the North and the South of Italy (Fantozzi, 2011). In the South, as mentioned above, economics is largely dependent on politics, and this, in the absence of industrial work and civic subcultures, has found acceptance in family networks. They, in turn, have become an autonomous force, a political subject in themselves, illustrating the phenomena of politicisation of primary groups which have been discussed above.

In comparison with the strengths of the Southern Italian familistic model, it is nonetheless possible to identify some aspects of crisis which highlight changes in the model; hence, it nowadays shows some ambivalence resulting from the operation of contradictory forces. On the one hand, aspects of the familistic model, so strong until now, are weakening, through processes we shall show shortly; but, on the other hand, familism is not disappearing, but, on the contrary, true to its flexible and mimetic capacities, it is changing its forms and possibly even becoming stronger.

The first factor concerns the role of birth rates and fertility: the demographic crisis which is particularly intense in the Southern Italian regions. Italy in general, in comparison with other European countries, currently has a very low level of fertility; specifically, the Southern regions, which in the past represented a demographic reserve for the entire country, have since 2006 had lower birth and fertility rates than the Central-Northern regions – so much so as to hypothesise a demographic implosion for the South. In 2014, its fertility rate was 1.34 children per woman, in comparison to 1.43 in the Centre-North of Italy. Furthermore, we can now observe a historical minimum of registered births (174,000), leading commentators to expect a significant demographic transformation in future decades (Svimez, 2015). The decrease in numbers of family members surely weakens the familistic model, which in the past drew strength from its extended family networks. However, in contrast with this weakness, it is now also possible to observe a model of familism which emphasises and strengthens intergenerational bonds between parents and their small numbers of children, with an intense projection and a strong investment by the parents in the children, within a family which in these respects remain strong (Dalla Zuanna, 2001).

The second factor which has weakened the familistic model is related to reductions in public expenditure, as a consequence firstly of the fiscal crisis of the State, then of the processes of federalisation which have involved the Italian State, and finally, the economic crisis that started in 2008. The reduction in public resources has surely undermined the basis of the formation of political consensus controlled by particularistic, familistic, and clientelistic networks, and thus, it has eroded familistic-popular clientelism. However, it is important to note that this aspect too shows an ambivalence. On the one hand, it reduces the space available for political particularism, but on the other, it produces the concentration of ever scarcer resources among narrower groups, which take possession of these instruments and control them. In this sense, decreasing social mobility (Schizzerotto, 2013) makes the family a crucial ascriptive resource, most of all for access to the professions; this strengthens forms of socio-professional familism, which are more incisive in the higher strata of the population (Carboni, 2007). Phenomena related to the personalisation of politics also tend to emphasise the forms of familism which affect the elite, so that the familistic chain is still an element of legitimation and a factor in political strength.

As far as the lower strata of the population are concerned, family solidarity constitutes one of the most efficacious strategic resources for facing the threat of poverty and the precarity of life conditions, as argued by Gambardella and Morlicchio (2005) in their discussion of ‘forced familism’. In fact, the characteristics of the Italian welfare regime and in particular of the South of Italy, in addition to the weakness of the public system of redistribution (mainly based on pensions), emphasise the role of networks of primary solidarity as an essential resource for containing poverty, which is on the increase. In fact, as the data used by Svimez (2015) show, in the South of Italy, one person out of three risks poverty and, from 2011 to 2014, numbers of poor families increased, with an increment of 37.8% in comparison to 34.4% in the Centre-North. In general, in a familistic society, the crisis of the pillars of Fordism (Castel, 2004) strengthens the need for community (Bauman, 2001) in all the social classes, redefining familism in new forms.

The third aspect concerns both the increasing phenomena of mass illegality (La Spina, 2005), which is particularly intense in the South, although widespread across the entire country, and, at the same time, the diffusion of forms of opposition to illegality, both through judicial enquiries and through the mobilisation of parts of civil society, as well as by social movements against the mafias. Phenomena of illegality often have their origins in particularistic and familistic bases and in political clientelism, including the familistic-popular version, which always presents aspects of illegality, thus itself becoming a permanent producer of illegality. In this sense, we reject the thesis asserting the idea of a virtuous clientelism, able, in certain conditions, to generate development (Piattoni, 1998). In fact, clientelism is vicious in all of its forms, even when it is connected with indicators of economic growth, since, because of the forms taken by its reproduction, it always needs to undermine and weaken belief in legality. Hence, in the long term, it is always an obstacle to autonomous and responsible development.

Thus, in this case too, we can observe an ambivalence. On the one hand, there is the growth of forms of opposition to the use of power for familial or any particularistic aims. It is worth noting, as Jedlowski (1992) stresses, the rise of a new class of professionals which is trying to oppose itself and the logic of professionalism to the logic of clientelism, introducing processes of rationalisation and principles of universalism within the society. But, at the same time, members of this group are not inclined to impose themselves politically and they ‘lack the social and political legitimacy required to become real agents of change’ (Jedlowski, 1992, p. 213). In addition, there are several groups within the voluntary sector, as well as entrepreneurs and politicians opposing clientelism, forms of illegality, and mafia organisations; but they have not succeeded in establishing joint networks able to initiate significant social action. On the other hand, there remains the reproduction of forms of manipulating both social norms and family bonds, as useful elements for adaptating to a context of crisis within politics, economics, and the professions. In particular, as mentioned above, a familistic tendency can be observed in contemporary processes of the personalisation of politics, to which are added forms of neopatrimonialism aimed at the private appropriation of public resources.

The final aspect of change concerns the secularisation of family relationships and, in particular, the separation between the affective dimension and the traditional one. The family is tending to become less of a traditional community in terms of its value aspects, though some of its structural features are tending to remain in situ. The marginalisation of the family’s value dimension and the maintenance of its structural aspects, highlighted by Shils (1981), can also be traced in the use of political influence, in particular in political clientelism, since the structure is used to obtain more votes in political contests and for the selection of politicians. We would argue that in the South of Italy, there has been a selective revision of the tradition, and family has maintained its central function in the society. The structural dimension of the tradition (the family and kinship network as the basis of social and power reproduction) and its mechanical–functional senses have been conserved, while its sacred and communitarian value aspects have been weakened and redefined at the individual level. What still remains is the family as a source of social capital and as a useful social bond. By emancipating themselves from family structures, individuals tend to use family bonds for personal objectives. In this way, the traditional communitarian structures become functional for individuals, who remain tied to the tradition, but who functionalise it personally for their own purposes.

In our view, these are the most interesting elements to emerge from research carried out in a society with strong familistic traits, where the family community has remained permanently central during processes of change, thanks to its capacity to redefine and reposition itself within the wider social context. Thus, the social bond based on family and kinship is today still the pillar of Southern Italian society even as it is immersed in globalisation, and although the contents and the quality of this bond as well as its obligations, its constraints, and its resources have been radically transformed – together with the logics of action and of choice used by the actors concerned and the institutions of the society.

The authors would like to thank Paolo Jedlowski for his critical reading and insightful suggestions, and Tommaso Vitale for his incisive feedback

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.