Universalism vs. particularism: a round trip from sociology to economics

Guido de Blasio, Diego Scalise () and Paolo Sestito
Additional contact information
Diego Scalise: Banca d'Italia

No 212, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: Social scientists, in particular sociologists, claim that the distinction between universalistic and particularistic values is relevant to explaining the social behaviour of individuals (and societies). This paper provides preliminary empirical evidence that supports the claim. It first defines a number of proxies for the degree of particularism embedded into long-celebrated dimensions of social behaviour (trust, political awareness, and associational activities). Then, it shows that the particularistic measures are positively correlated to each other and negatively correlated to some established generalist measures for all dimensions of social behaviour considered, both across and within countries and regions. Moreover, the paper relates that the various proxies for particularism share the same set of covariates (such as low education and income), which are neatly distinguishable from the determinants of the generalist measures.

Keywords: particularism; social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2014-0212/QEF_212.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Universalism vs. particularism: a round trip from sociology to economics (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_212_14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().