Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2018
Il tema che intendo svolgere nelle pagine seguenti costituisce uno sviluppo - su un registro prevalentemente metodologico - di uno specifico problema cognitivo, che da alcuni anni è al centro dei miei interessi di ricerca. A tale problema, definibile con Carlo Tullio-Altan come «sindrome dell'arretratezza socioculturale italiana» (1986; 1989), ho tentato negli ultimi anni di portare dei contributi di conoscenza empirica, approfondendo gli aspetti del comportamento elettorale, degli orientamenti cattolici e della tendenza al localismo (Cartocci 1990; 1991a; 1991b).
In the present day Italy, the religious cleavage is becoming much more prominent than in the past two decades. Bishops intervene in the cultural, political, and institutional debate and catholic political leaders discuss on the viability of a (new) catholic party.
The essay aims to ascertain the diffusion of catholic values and their geography. It first deals with two alternative ways to manage the concept-variable nexus (semantic vs. syntactic); then it underlines the semantic limits of data collected by current sample surveys, which tend to smooth the difference between behaviours and opinions or attitudes.
In the final sections two aggregate indicators of catholic observance are presented: the number of civil marriages and the circulation of the catholic press. The author applies these two indicators to describe the different rates of secularization in the various zones of Italy during the 1980's. A typology of Italian provinces is finally proposed, which distinguishes among «secularized», «catholic», «conformist» and «in transition» ones.