CIVIL SOCIETY: cultural policies’ stepping stone

This research will focus on understanding the reasons why Italian current cultural policies, which aim at involving the privates within the cultural sector, are not effective. Specifically, I want to investigate, following Putnam (1993) and Harrison and Huntington (2000) researches, if a correlation between the failure of the indirect public support and a poor culture of giving, mixed with a low-implemented civil society actually exists. In Italy in fact even if many laws were established with the purpose of increase the private involvement into the cultural sector, none of them reach the expected level announced. According to that, I asked myself what are the reasons of this failure. This analysis aims indeed at answering the following research question: Why tax incentives, even though present, are not able to lead to a strong private involvement in supporting the cultural sector in Italy? The answer I found out is that it is not only government fault but by contrary it is something connected with the culture of people, who are not willing to donate even if they can have an economic or a personal return. According to that, it is not a matter of laws, or at least not only, but more a matter of society’s structure.