ABSTRACT
Italy appears to be the country par excellence in which to study negative attitudes towards politics for three reasons. First, while in many Western democracies a confidence gap between electors and political institutions appeared at the end of the 1960s, in Italy the existence of a low level of political consensus became apparent much earlier. At the end of the 1950s, Almond and Verba (1963) found that Italians scored very poorly in terms of civic culture and political integration. Building on the results of Almond and Verba’s empirical work, in 1965 La Palombara employed three well-chosen words to define Italians’ attitudes towards politics: alienation, fragmentation, and isolation. In doing so, he shaped a lasting image of Italian politics which has influenced generations of political science students.
