One size that didn’t fit all? Electoral franchise, fiscal capacity and the rise of mass schooling across Italy’s provinces, 1870–1911

Abstract

Italy's regions experienced different rates of human capital accumulation in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although Southern regions were very disadvantaged when the unification of the country took place in 1861, they caught up at a very slow pace -and a remarkable regional divide in education persisted until the Interwar period. While previous hypotheses have focused on the role played by fiscal capacity, this paper sheds new light on the effect that enfranchisement had on the growth of schooling. The presence of large regional disparities in local electoral franchise is confirmed by the data; however, the relationship between voting rights, the intensity of local direct taxation and municipal fiscal capacity is weak at best. Furthermore, if the impact of these factors is analysed separately through a number of econometric models, fiscal capacity stands out as the most significant determinant of education across Italy's provinces. Against recent hypotheses, these results show that the different distribution of political voice within Italy's municipalities did not determine the persistence of regional inequalities in schooling in the long-run: it was Italy's national education system, together with remarkable and pre-existent regional disparities, that slowed down the development of human capital in rural and Southern regions, with immense costs in terms of future prospects for economic growth and human development.

Democracy and Primary Education Spending in Spain, 1902-22

“…The extension of voting rights in this context had a modest positive effect. It was centralization, together with existing voting rights, that ultimately gave rise to schooling expansion (Lindert, 2004;Cappelli, 2016aCappelli, , 2016bCappelli and Vasta, 2020). Chaudhary et al (2012) also showed that decentralization and the lack of broad political voice in developing countries, particularly Brazil, Russia, India and China, led local elites to capture political institutions and delay the expansion of primary education.…”

A conflicted political will to levy local taxes: inequality and local school politics in Sweden, 1840–1900

“…There are also quantitative analyses that question the scope of the conclusions presented above. For example, Cappelli (2016) has shown that the distribution of political voice in Italian municipalities was not an important factor in the regional inequalities of schooling; Cvrcek and Zajicek (2013) have shown how the elites of the Habsburg Empire did not always oppose mass schooling but instead promoted schooling under certain conditions. In the case of 10 counties in southern Sweden, Andersson and Berger (2016) found that school districts dominated by local elitesthat is, districts with a high concentration of votes in the hands of a few individualsindeed had higher expenditure levels than comparatively egalitarian school districts.…”

The geography of innovation in Italy, 1861–1913: evidence from patent data

“…In particular, we examine the relationship between human capital and inventive activities. Our focus on the innovation-human capital nexus at local level is easily motivated by noting that the different trajectories of human capital accumulation are, in fact, very often considered as one of the primary factors accounting for the divide in economic performance between Northern and Southern Italy (Felice 2012, Cappelli 2015. In this perspective, the possible connection between human capital and geographical patterns of innovative activities is a research issue that so far has not been explicitly tackled.…”