Abstract
We present novel data from a survey on the perception of dishonesty in Italy. We collected data at a mass-gathering music festival in Southern Italy, whose audience includes a relevant fraction of subjects residing in Northern Italy. The survey consists of questions on perceived dishonesty measured on an institutional, social, and everyday dimension. Using structural equation models, we estimate whether regional differences in the perception of dishonesty persist even when controlling for generalized trust and socio-demographic characteristics. From a sample of nearly 1000 individuals, we find that respondents residing in the North or abroad perceive a lower level of dishonesty in its institutional and everyday dimension than Southern respondents. Perceived dishonesty also correlates negatively with trust. Finally, we find suggestive evidence of an indirect channel going from the area of residence to perceived dishonesty through generalized trust as a mediator.
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Data availability
The datasets analysed during the current study are available in the Mendeley repository available at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/hhbgfk54g5/1.
Notes
Data are from ISTAT, the National Institute of Statistics of Italy (www.istat.it/en). Sources: (i) Net income: Regions and type of municipality—year 2020; (ii) Unemployment rate: Provincial data—year 2022; (iii) BES 2020 Report on “Equitable and sustainable well-being in Italy” (Chapter 7: Safety, pp. 131–146); (iv) Declared and undeclared employment by industry and population: Rate of undeclared work—year 2020; v) Infant mortality by territory of residence: Infant mortality rates—year 2020; (vi) 2019 Report on “Separate waste collection: Citizens’ behavior and satisfaction, policies of cities—years 2017–2018”.
Among the few studies reporting an opposite correlation, Azar and Applebaum (2020) found that in a children's mathematics contest in Israel, a stronger socio-economic level of the city was associated with more dishonesty in the contest by children (and parents or older siblings).
Whereas most of the literature identifies social capital as a lubricant of society, Xu and Wang (2015) also consider its association with the attitude to thrift and find that people who are more trusting, in general, tend to value thrift less. This has to do with social capital’s role as informal insurance.
It is important to control for the employment status of respondents in the econometric analysis, given that unemployed people tend to have lower levels of trust not only in the main economic institutions but also in the police and the law (Hudson 2006).
Most experimental evidence about dishonesty in social interactions relies on laboratory experiments (e.g., Gneezy 2005). Azar et al. (2013, 2019) were the first to add some field evidence to it by conducting a field experiment in a restaurant. They found that most customers (128 out of 192) did not return the excessive change.
Detailed data about attendees’ provenance and distribution across Italian regions for editions 2007–2010 are reported in Attanasi and Giordano (2011), pp. 320–321.
The three villages are Sternatia (2,500 inhabitants), Martano (9500), and Melpignano (2000). They are located at the end of Southeast Italy, at the bottom of the Apulia region, the Italian “heel”.
As for age: 29% of subjects aged more than 60 refused the interview, while this percentage is 19% for age range 40–60, 21% for age range 31–39, 17% for age range 26–30, and 15% for age range 18–25; for gender: 18% of females and 21% of males refused the interview; for provenance: 20% of subjects living in Southern Italy, and 16% of those living in Northern Italy and 19% of those living abroad refused the interview.
See Question 14 and Question 16 in Appendix 2, respectively, for occupation (job type) and categories of daily expenditure. As for the distribution of occupation, the results of the Kruskal–Wallis test hold regardless of whether we compare Northern Italian visitors to Southern Italian visitors or to Southern Italian locals or to both of them (see Appendix Fig. 4).
The latter statement is clearer when comparing local ties of Northern Italian visitors to those of interviewees coming from foreign countries: as for the latter, Appendix Table 8 reports that more than 6/10 of them are native to the area of the event, and almost 3/10 are there to visit relatives and/or friends, both fractions being significantly higher than for Northern Italian visitors.
In the Questionnaire, we also included a question about perceived dishonesty in environments that can be assimilated into the private sector. In the paper, we disregard this question because (i) many respondents are not answering a question about private schools, as they are not very common in Italy; (ii) we do not have any objective measure of dishonesty in these environments. Estimates relative to the private sector can be obtained from the authors upon request.
We consider as South of Italy all areas from the Rome region (Lazio, included) downward, i.e., Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, and the two islands, Sicily, and Sardinia.
Due to the low number of observations of respondents living abroad, we refrain from conducting statistical tests on that category.
The first row of Appendix Table 9, 10, and 11 confirms a significant rank correlation between generalized trust and perceived dishonesty in the three dimensions of Table 4 (respectively, public sector, everyday life circumstances, and social interactions) for the subsamples of Italian subjects considered separately.
A set of Chi-squared tests on the equality of the two coefficients give the following results: Column (1): 4.01, p-value = 0.045; Column (2): 11.55, p-value < 0.001; Column (3): 10.84, p-value = 0.001; Column (4): 14.53, p-value < 0.001; Column (5): 1.33, p-value = 0.248.
A set of ordered probit regressions conducted on the original variables do not display relevant differences concerning Table 5. The output of this analysis is available from the authors upon request.
Appendix Table 10 confirms a significant rank correlation between Generalized trust and perceived dishonesty in everyday life circumstances for each of the four everyday dimensions of Table 6 (public offices, public hospitals, public schools, and police) for at least one subsample of Italian subjects considered separately.
Appendix Table 11 confirms a significant rank correlation between Generalized trust and the probability of not having a lost wallet returned under each of the four conditions (“La Notte della Taranta”, your city, in North Italy and South Italy) for each subsample of Italian subjects considered separately.
The same geographical polarization of Fig. 2 is obtained with other indexes linked to illegal and criminal activities (see, e.g., Bernardo et al. 2021; Mocetti and Rizzica 2021). They both highlight a regional disparity for criminal activities, with the Southern areas being more affected by the “traditional” activities associated with organized crime (i.e., mafia).
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Luigi De Mitri and Salvatore Vergine for excellent research assistance in conducting the survey.
Funding
Giuseppe Attanasi gratefully acknowledges financial support by the program MUR PRIN 2022 20229LRAHK “The impact of past experience and of social identity on risk perception of (new) unforeseen contingencies”, the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) under grant ANR-18-CE26-0018–01 (project GRICRIS), the European Research Council (ERC) [Starting Grant DU 283953] and by the project “Creative, Sustainable Economies and Societies” (CSES) coordinated by Robin Cowan, funded through the University of Strasbourg IDEX Unistra.
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Appendices
Appendix 1. Sample representativeness
See Table 8 and Figs. 3, 4, 5.
Geographical distribution of non-local interviewees vs. Italian population. Data on the Italian population are from ISTAT
Distribution of interviewees’ occupation by provenance
Distribution of non-local interviewees’ daily expenditure (in €) by provenance
Appendix 2. Questionnaire (The full version of the questionnaire is available upon request)
Appendix 3. Further Tests of Research Hypothesis 2
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Attanasi, G., Bucciol, A., Cicognani, S. et al. The Italian North–South Divide in Perceived Dishonesty: A Matter of Trust?. Ital Econ J (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-023-00258-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-023-00258-y