State Formation, Social Unrest and Cultural Distance: Brigandage in Post-Unification Italy

Giampaolo Lecce, Laura Ogliari and Tommaso Orlando

No 17089, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: What determines violent reaction during state formation processes? To address this question, we exploit the uprisings that occurred when southern Italy was annexed to Piedmont during Italian unification in the 1860s. We assemble a novel dataset on episodes of brigandage, a form of violent rebellion against the unitary government, and on pre-unification social and economic characteristics of southern Italian municipalities. We find that the intensity of brigandage is ceteris paribus lower in and close to settlements of Piedmontese origin. We argue that geographical distance from these communities is a proxy for cultural distance from the Piedmontese rulers. Thus, our results suggest that, in the context of state formation, cultural proximity to the new ruler reduces social unrest by local communities. After ruling out alternative mechanisms consistent with the economic literature, we provide suggestive evidence of cultural persistence and diffusion in our context, and discuss two possible culture-based drivers of our results: social identification with the Piedmontese rulers, and a clash between local values and some specific content of the new institutions.

Keywords: Cultural diffusion; Culture; Institutions; Social unrest; State formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 N43 P16 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17089 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cpr:ceprdp:17089

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17089

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().