PAOLO FELTRIN

Le culture politiche locali: alcune osservazioni critiche sugli studi condotti in Italia

N. 146

Summary - The studies on the local political cultures are analyzed starting from an attempt to classify the approaches, that takes into account the substantial interests in research work and the prevalent analytical methodologies. After an illustrative survey of the merits and limits of the three approaches, the essay examines the problems of the territorial political subcultures, criticizing some interpretations of the phenomenon from an almost "naturalistic" point of view to uphold, instead, the importance of the organizing and "artificial" aspects of the subcultural foundation, which refer, for this reason itself, to the specific operating modalities of the local politica1 systems. The debate is then reviewed on the relations between policy and economy in the zones with a great subcultural dominance, in order to call attention to some problems existing in the all-embracing interpretations. This does not mean to overlook the queries posed by the persistence of zones of the country with a great subcultural dominance: the suggestion put forward in this respect is to reopen the research field about this crucial point, leaving out the historical sequences too specific (which run the risk of sliding into explanation ad hoc) to propose again in more general terms, through a research program explicitly meant for the cross-national comparison, the problem of the political enclaves. In fact, the enclaves for long dominated by the same political tradition seem to be the norm, not the exception, within almost all national systems. Thus, in the end, it is suggested that the crucial historical turning-point to which refer as the starting term of these processes be identified in the phase of attributing also to the countryside the political citizenship and, therefore, in that historiographical knot not yet entirely untied concerning the relations between the rural world in decline and the construction of the liberal-democratic State.