Date of Graduation

Spring 5-23-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in International and Development Economics (MSIDEC)

College/School

College of Arts and Sciences

Department/Program

Economics

First Advisor

Alessandra Cassar

Abstract

This paper examines whether cultural familism — the orientation of trust toward family at the expense of strangers and civic institutions — shapes civic institutional engagement in Italy across three levels of analysis. The first analysis links four familism indices constructed from the European Values Study (2017) to pre-COVID municipal 5 per mille tax allocation rates across approximately 7,700 Italian municipalities, finding that higher Trust Gap and Institutional Distrust robustly predict lower baseline civic giving, both nationally and within each region. The second analysis uses a Regression Discontinuity in Time design exploiting the sharp onset of COVID-19 in 2020, finding a broad solidarity rally in both Northern and Southern Italy, with suggestive evidence that familism moderated the magnitude of the response di!erently across regions. The third analysis draws on an original lab-in-the-field experiment conducted across four Italian regions in Summer 2025, demonstrating that the individual-level Trust Gap predicts significantly less generous allocation toward strangers in incentivized Dictator Games, while finding no e!ect on Public Goods Game contributions. Together, these findings suggest that cultural familism shapes the baseline level of civic participation and individual prosocial behavior toward strangers, but that acute institutional stress can partially override this suppression. Identifying the conditions under which civic salience rises, and whether individual trust gaps can be shifted, is a direct path toward policies that build lasting participation.

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