A Measure of Trust The Italian Regional Divide in a Latent Class Approach

Social differences within countries may partly explain the lack of economic convergence and the persistence of regional disparities. The case of Italy is emblematic: economic gap between North and South remains at high levels with large differences in social capital and in trust. In this paper, we u...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocial indicators research Vol. 140; no. 1; pp. 209 - 242
Main Authors Fazio, Gioacchino, Giambona, Francesca, Vassallo, Erasmo, Vassiliadis, Elli
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Science + Business Media 01.11.2018
Springer Netherlands
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Activities of daily living
Class differences
Convergence
Cultural differences
Everyday life
Households
Human Geography
Latent class analysis
Mapping
Microeconomics
North and South
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Partition
Public Health
Quality of Life Research
Regional differences
Regional variations
Social capital
Social research
Social Sciences
Socioeconomic factors
Sociology
Trust
Typology
Italian regions
Latent class analysis
Trust
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Summary:Social differences within countries may partly explain the lack of economic convergence and the persistence of regional disparities. The case of Italy is emblematic: economic gap between North and South remains at high levels with large differences in social capital and in trust. In this paper, we use the micro data from the ISTAT “Aspects of Daily Life” Survey to build a measure of “trust in others” and a measure of “trust in institutions” through a latent class model to attribute a trust score to the Italian households and the Italian regions and, in this way, to add elements of knowledge useful to policies. Our measures confirm a persistent territorial divide although the regional mapping appears more complex than the classical North–South partition. At last, a discussion on the household typology shows that the territorial gaps of trust persist even among households with similar socio-economic characteristics.
ISSN:0303-8300
1573-0921
DOI:10.1007/s11205-017-1756-4