Description:

Speaker: Caterina Alfonzo

Title: The Legacy of Feudalism and Sicilian Low Social Capital.

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of feudal institutions in hampering the short- and long-term accumulation of social capital. Focusing on Sicily, we construct a novel municipality-level dataset and show that the experience and type of feudal institutions predicts local social capital shortly after the formal abolition of feudalism. We suggest that the production structure put into place by feudal landlords favored the prevalence of socially-isolated nuclear families, incapable to develop inter-family solidarity and mutual trust. Finally, we find that the legacy of feudalism, not the rise of the Mafia, is negatively associated with today’s social capital and economic progress – thus providing a novel explanation for Sicily’s social and economic backwardness.