Social capital, institutional performance, and sustainability in Italy's regions: Still evidence of enduring historical effects?

Robert Putnam's celebrated book, Making Democracy Work, identified “path dependent” sources of differences in social capital in Italy's regions as an explanation for their variations in success at “overcoming dilemmas of collective action” (1993, p. 167). This article identifies among Italy's regions: (1) the relationships among Putnam's historical legacy-based levels of social capital on the one hand, and subsequent contemporary levels of social capital on the other hand; and, (2) the relationships of both of these sets of measures to variations in contemporary Italian regional institutional performance and sustainability indicators. The results show that: (1) historic and contemporary social capital levels at the regional level are strongly linked; and, (2), that they both are strongly related to contemporary indicators of regional institutional performance and sustainability initiatives, but that the historic effects appear to take a path through contemporary social capital levels. These findings are consistent with Putnam's theory of path dependence in explaining the persisting differences in performance across Italian regions.