Explaining How Political Culture Changes: Catholic Activism and the Secular Left in Italian Peace Movements

Abstract

Political cultures have usually been studied as static and perhaps monolithic. If any attention has been dedicated to how political cultures change it has been devoted to exogenous factors. In recent years, however, some authors have advocated exploring the role of endogenous factors. In this article, we will reflect on the advantages of a comprehensive approach to explaining how political cultures change, embracing endogenous and exogenous factors. We will look at peace mobilizations in Italy as a case study, which allows examination of the interactions of the two political cultures of Marxism and Catholicism. Our work suggests some provisional theories about the dynamics that lead to hybridization between different political families. These dynamics can be understood through the genealogy of a "grammar of responsibility". We argue that the factors that condition change in political culture relate to both the national and the international political context. We also show how these processes of change occur as a result of collective action, although individuals also perform important functions of co-ordination, brokerage, leadership, and subversion of codes. Moreover, we show that change in political cultures does not occur in a linear manner but follows a shifting course, which alternates periods of innovation and of involution or regression.

Governance Beyond the Rhetoric: Organizational Action, Change, and Illusion in the Italian Local Welfare System

“…The only exception is Genoa. The effects of the political cleavage between NPOs linked with the Christian Democratic Party and those connected with the Communist Party are still present at the local level as has been shown in some recent works, both when considering the third sector per se (Biorcio & Vitale, 2016; Tosi & Vitale, 2009) and when considering governance arrangements (Bassoli, 2017). Among the eligible cities, Genoa is thus the only case close to the Italian average with respect to the number of NPOs per thousand inhabitants (ranking 59/112), which has not been subject to the presence of a clear subculture in the past 40 years.…”

Catholic Versus Communist: An Ongoing Issue—The Role of Organizational Affiliation in Accessing the Policy Arena

“…Only after the collapse of the Soviet Regime, the role of the Catholic Church has been assessed in the critical juncture (Anderson 2003;Donovan 2003). In more recent years, only rarely have scholars dwelt on the legacy of Communism in post-Communist countries (O'Mahony 2003;Saxonberg and Szelewa 2007), while an actual debate on Western Europe is almost non-existent anywhere but Italy (Bassoli et al 2011;Tosi and Vitale 2009). The reason for this exception lies in the specific nature of the clash between Catholicism and Communism in Italy during the Cold War (Salvati 2003), which created an ongoing debate and continues to hold influence today (Cento Bull 2000).…”

“…Scholars have studied the impact of this duality in both countries both in the past and more recently. The ongoing effects of this division, however, are still debated, given also the increasing fuzziness between these sub-cultures (Tosi and Vitale 2009). For this reason, the article, using a social network analysis approach, dwells on this division in order to answer some key questions regarding both the societal and political spheres.…”

Young Muslims' Everyday Tactics and Strategies: Resisting Islamophobia, Negotiating Italianness, Becoming Citizens

“…She is a cyber-activist and also a critical consumer, i.e., she practises everyday micro-politics where even minimal individual actions can have extraordinary cumulative effects (Ginsborg 2004). She draws culturally from a grammar of direct responsibility (Tosi and Vitale 2009) that urges people to go beyond the mere protest to take a positive stand in relation to the setting in which they live and to find solutions for social change in their daily lives. This attitude also seems to influence the way in which these people live their faith as Said suggests: ''It is time to do away with abstract debates, we should stop talking about religion in general.…”