Brigandage and the political legacy of monarchical legitimacy in Southern Italy

Matteo Ruzzante and Cristoforo Pizzimenti

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2025, vol. 235, issue C

Abstract: Political legitimacy plays a pivotal role in securing the effectiveness and longevity of a governing system, yet it can be eroded by the way rulers handle popular uprisings. This paper studies whether a historical shock in the legitimacy of monarchic rule can have long-term, intergenerational consequences on political attitudes. The unification of Italy ignited a violent reaction against the new ruler in its southern provinces known as the “Great Brigandage”. We use fixed effects regressions with a wide set of controls and an instrumental variable approach based on military suitability of the terrain in order to show that, ceteris paribus, municipalities exposed to brigandage in the 1861–1870 period had lower turnout in the 1946 Institutional Referendum and were significantly less likely to vote for the survival of the monarchy. Heterogeneity analysis leveraging a spatial discontinuity in martial law suggests that anti-monarchic sentiment likely stemmed from the collective memory of brigandage repression. We interpret our findings as evidence that latent preferences toward political systems are endogenously shaped by historical events and can be brought to the surface by changes in the institutional environment.

Keywords: Political legitimacy; Monarchy; Tradition; Civil conflict; Repression; Collective memory; Persistence of preferences; Risorgimento; Southern Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H73 N43 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:235:y:2025:i:c:s0167268125001209

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107000

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