The central thesis of the whole study is the recognition of the dynamic nature of the political agenda in contemporary Italy. More specifically, Leonardi et al. point to a systematic transition from Italian centralized governance to the acquisition of greater sovereign powers by individual regional governments (5).
The increase in political diversity within the context in question generates a need to discuss the effectiveness of the policies pursued, which is what Leonardi et al. subsequently do. One such achievement of the study is the discovery of the heterogeneity of civil society as a result of the political participation of the population in the decisions made. In fact, the authors conclude that Italian municipalities are heterogeneous, and the level of acceptance of civil society in each of them varies, to which the author finds a clear historical justification.
The key research question is to identify the factors that make local governments most influential and politically strong. The hypothesis of the work as such was not clearly formulated by the authors, but one can try to compose it on his own. The initial assumption was that regional governments in Italy have heterogeneous policies due to the historical and cultural background of the region. It is noteworthy that the study is quantitative-qualitative (mixed) in nature and does not conduct as such a real, academically rigorous study, but instead describes a critical historical analysis using statistical methods of numerical data processing.
Thus, it uses regional institutions, namely the policies they implement, as an independent variable. Manipulating this variable, that is, considering different aspects of the policies of different municipalities, leads to a change in the dependent variable, which is the political identity and the management strategies undertaken. The philosophy of the methodology comes down to the use of several techniques that allow creating a critical evaluation of the final result. Consequently, the techniques used included case studies, historical retrospective analysis, statistical processing of quantitative data.
Work Cited
Leonardi, Robert, Raffaella Y. Nanetti, and Robert D. Putnam. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.