Culture and tax avoidance: the case of Italy

ABSTRACT

Culture is increasingly used as an explanatory variable for tax evasion. So far, we know, however, little about the mechanisms that link culture and tax behavior. This paper is a historical-sociological study of how religion influences tax behavior. The contribution focuses on the Italian case, among Western-European countries one with the highest evasion rates. It argues that the willingness of Italians to pay their taxes still suffers today from the Church–state conflict of the 19th century. To the Vatican, territorial integration of the Italian state posed an existential threat, both at the political (loss of territory) and at the spiritual level (diffusion of liberalism). The paper shows how Catholic socio-economic thinkers developed ideas about just taxation in response to Italian reunification that were directed against the Italian state and used by the Vatican to delegitimize it. The paper shows that it is not only rational decisions about the possibility to get audited or low public service provision that drives tax evasion. Instead Italian tax evasion is legitimized through a historically grown mistrust toward the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Taxation
• tax evasion
• Italy
• culture
• catholicism

Introduction

With an estimated 200 billion Euros evaded in 2013 (27% of the whole tax intake), Italy is at the top when it comes to tax evasion in Western Europe. Eighty per cent of Italians believe that their fellow citizens evade taxes, a number that is only surpassed in Western Europe by the Greeks. In fact, ‘Italians from all social groups often describe themselves as a people of cynics, extreme individuals who do not care about the public good, opportunistic with clientelistic propensities, untrustworthy if not altogether liars’ (Patriarca 2010, 4). Scholars such as Robert Putnam and Edward Banfield have described this as amoral familism and cultural arguments of this type have become ever more popular amongst students of tax evasion. The low tax compliance rate of Italians is attributed to their lack of tax morale.

A series of experiments raised doubts about explanations in line with the amoral familism thesis. Confronted with equal institutions and incentives in experimental settings, Italians have the same propensity to cheat with their taxes than citizens of other countries and they are less likely to cheat one another (Andrighetto et al. 2016; D’Attoma 2018; Zhang et al. 2016). Furthermore, if Italians cheat, they ‘fudge’; they only cheat a little, not wholesale like their British and Swedish counterparts. When, however, asked to contribute to their own state, they cheat wholesale. This raised doubts about simplistic cultural explanations that point to defections in the character of Italians. The findings have been interpreted as pointing toward the weaker public goods provision by the Italian state that makes citizens feel ‘robbed’ of their money. This article argues instead for a more nuanced interpretation of the cultural explanation. It focuses on religion, a constitutive item of culture. The contribution argues that the predestination model embodied in Catholicism (in contrast to Protestant and reformed Protestant models) has some inbuilt features, like forgiveness, indulgences, repentance, that make fudging morally acceptable. Through a historical-sociological analysis the paper shows that these religious-sociological features of Catholicism became especially accentuated in the Italian case due to the severity of the church–state conflict since the Napoleonic occupation and during Italian unification in the nineteenth century. To the Vatican, territorial integration of the Italian nation state posed an existential threat, both at the political level (loss of territory) and at the spiritual level (diffusion of liberalism). From unification onwards, the Vatican did all it could to harm the legitimacy of the Italian state. This is, in contrast to the essentialist and a-historical cultural approaches in the tradition of Banfield, derived through a tight genealogical tracing of how the state-church conflict has shaped the attitudes of Italians toward their state.

This paper follows this process from the Napoleonic invasion to the end of World War II and shows that the Vatican was highly successful in delegitimizing the Italian state and its right to tax. It does so by analyzing how Catholic social thought and its provisions on taxation were influenced by the state-church conflict. The Italian experience stands in sharp contrast to the Swedish and the UK cases where the church entered into symbiosis with the state during the nation-building process. In Sweden and the UK the church’s legitimacy, social anchoring and information were used to extract taxes, sometimes even with priests as tax collectors. None of this happened in Italy. In contrast, in Italy priests sometimes legitimized evasion. The willingness of Italians to pay their taxes still suffers today from the church–state conflict. By following this road, the article contributes the micro-historical foundations in the Italian case for the growing literature that points toward the early-modern origins of today’s states’ fiscal capacities and tax extraction capabilities (D’Arcy and Nistotskaya 2018, 2017; Kanter and Walsh 2019). Taking a critical approach to the study of tax evasion the article shows that Italian tax evasion is not solely driven by rational decisions of individuals about low auditing or low public service provision as the mainstream literature suggests but based on a sociologically-historically grown mistrust toward the state that goes back to the state-church conflict of the 19th century.

The contribution will first give an insight into the magnitude of tax evasion in Italy and show how national discourse connects it to the centuries-old debate about the Italian character. The second part discusses the connection between religion and tax morale and sketches out the evasive tendencies of different Christian denominations. The third part analyzes how doctrine and state–church conflicts interacted and reenforced themselves in Italy, first during the Napoleonic occupation and later during the nation-building process in the late nineteenth century. The fourth part examines the partial relaxation of the state–church conflict during the fascist dictatorship and in the immediate postwar period, and discusses its impact on tax morale. The last part concludes.

Tax evasion in Italy

Yearly tax evasion in Italy throughout the 2000s varied between 170 and 240 billion Euros. This is ten times higher than the US evasion rate (Bame-Aldred et al. 2013, 390; Chiarini, Marzano, and Schneider 2009, 279). In international rankings Italy is usually found at the top, surpassed in Western Europe only by Greece (Zhang et al. 2016).

Putting tax evasion in Italy into historical perspective is hard. Comprehensive time lines on evasion have existed only since the 1980s and the historiography on taxation in Italy is thin. Tax evasion was high during the liberal period (1871–1922) and during fascism (1922–1943). This we can derive from the frequency of tax revolts and tax protests across the peninsula (Riall 2008). The evasion rates declined at the beginning of the first republic (1945–1992), but started to increase in the 1970s and reached a peak in the 1980s (Marigliani and Pisani 2006, 13, 16). The rates decreased in the 1990s but increased again during the early 2000s (Santoro 2010, 31).

In percentage terms this means that during the 1970s between 15 and 20% of Italians evaded taxes while the rate climbed to 26% in the 1980s. In the 1990s, tax evasion fell again, hovering between 15 and 20%. Workers employed in manufacturing evade very little, whereas the highest evasion rates can be found among the self-employed (Chiri and Sestito 2014, 38, 41; Marino and Zizza 2010). Little evasion can be observed in the construction and industrial sectors. The severity of evasion becomes obvious when we consider that the Italian state annually collects a total of   727billion Euros while losing 250 billion Euros through evasion (D’Attoma 2017).

What makes tax evasion such a widespread phenomenon in Italy? The debate about Italian tax evasion follows the general debates on the determinants of tax evasion. Economists argue that the reasons lie in the lax controls and the soft legal penalties for evaders in Italy (Manestra 2010; Santoro and Fiorio 2011, 103). Psychologists think that Italians evade because they perceive taxation as unfair since they do not get much in return for their payments to the state (Cannari and D’Alessio 2007, 31; Chiarini, Marzano, and Schneider 2009, 275). Behavioral economists point to strong social multiplier effects.

These findings echo Margaret Levi’s earlier research on the historical development of extraction capacities of states. In ‘Of rules and revenue’ Levi argued that rulers need to foster ”quasi-voluntary compliance” (Levi 1988, 13). Quasi-voluntary compliance is achieved if citizens think the state punishes free-riders. In other words, citizens are willing to pay taxes if free riders do not make them look like fools. Moreover, since permanent monitoring and coercion is costly ”rulers are providing goods, usually collective goods” (Levi 1988, 11) to butter the willingness of their citizens’ to pay taxes. The willingness of citizens’ to pay taxes is for Levi a function of the experience of individuals with the state either through the experience of coercion or public goods provision (Levi 1996, 48). This type of contractual argument, where citizen’s argue that they evade taxes either because they do not get much in return or because they see too many people evading, is also supported by contemporary anthropological work on tax evasion in Italy (Guano 2010). The contractual argument has however limits. In the northern parts of Italy, like in the boom region of Lombardy, public service provision is excellent also in comparison to many northern European countries.

If one asks Italians why they evade taxes, they primarily say that they evade because everyone else does so (Cannari and D’Alessio 2007, 31; Galbiati and Zanella 2012). A distant second is the reason that Italians would be more likely to pay taxes if they had the feeling that the state would spend their money more wisely. Much lower in the ranking come issues such as the soft penalties for evasive behavior, the complexity of the tax rules and the unlikeliness of being caught. A total of 87.1% of all Italians think that their fellow citizens evade taxes (Cannari and D’Alessio 2007, 37).

Cultural approaches have become ever more frequent in the literature on tax evasion in recent years (Torgler 2006). Scholars have identified diverging national ‘tax morals’ across countries. Summing up a series of experiments Lewis and his collaborators conclude that ‘given the similarities between the tax systems of the UK and Italy’ the differences can be attributed ‘at least partly’ to cultural factors (Lewis Alan, Carrera, and Jones 2009, 438). In the literature on tax evasion it has become ever more commonplace that ‘culture envelopes attitudes towards tax compliance and evasion’ (Bame-Aldred et al. 2013, 434).

Culture also seems to explain evasion in the Italian case. If we look at the centuries-old debate about the Italian character, we find a negative consensus prevailing that describes Italian civic culture as ‘far from flattering’ (Patriarca 2013, 4; see also Bollati 1972). Italians themselves are convinced that ‘their character is faulty, and that this faultiness even explains much of their social and political problems of their country today’ (Patriarca 2013, 5). As early as the eighteenth century travelers passing through Italy on their Grand Tour described the Italian character as ‘morally corrupt’ (Patriarca 2013, 20). They were frequently seconded by Italian observers. Carlo Pilati wrote in 1770 that his people were ‘lazy, timid, full of vices, and inclined to superstition’ (Pilati 1770, 587).

This negative framing of the Italian character intensified in the run-up to unification in the nineteenth century. It was adopted by Italians of all political colors. The clerico-nationalist Vincenzo Gioberti wrote in 1846 in Del Primato Morale E Civile Degli Italiani that ‘[t]he greatest of all evil in Italy, I repeat, is the voluntary decline of national genius, the weakening of patriotic spirits, the excessive love of money and pleasure, the frivolity of customs, the slavery of intellects, the imitation of foreign things, the bad ordering of education, of public and private discipline’ (Gioberti 1920, 147). Giuseppe Mazzini, the famous leftist national revolutionary, described in 1832 ‘our mortal plague’ as ‘the innate distrust of leaders, and the perennial suspicion of betrayals’ (Mazzini [1832] 1944, 77) and the liberal conservative nationalist icon Massimo D’Azeglio saw his fellow citizens as ‘a people heavily corrupted’ that needed to be ‘reeducated’ (Patriarca 2013, 56). In 1878, eight years after Italy had been unified, Antonio Reale reflected that ‘it became fashionable to assert that the Italians [were] a people of little character, indifferent, slothful, skeptical, corrupt, dissimulating’ (Patriarca 2013, 67). The British journalist Tobias Jones assesses in his popular book The Dark Heart of Italy (2003, 17) that ‘[f]ew countries have citizens with such an “each to his own” mentality, or so much menefreghismo, I don’t careism (signaled with the back of the fingers thrown forward from the throat to the chin).’ Social scientists such as Putnam and Banfield coined the term amoral familism to describe the (Southern) Italian character. In order to ”maximize the material, short run advantage of the nuclear family” (Banfield 1958, 85, Ferragina 2009 version) human action focuses on short term gain pursuing the rational interest of the nuclear family. It is the core reason for the absence of collective action and economic development in Southern Italy. Banfield’s book, based on fieldwork in the 1950s in the town of Chiaramonte, inspired classics like Almond and Verba’s ”The civic culture” (1963), Putnam’s ”Making Democracy Work” (1993), and Fukuyama’s ”Trust” (1995).

Putnam strengthened Banfield’s methodology, widened the empirical scope to the entire South and added a historical path dependency argument that saw the basis of Southern Italy’s amoral familism in authoritarian rule of Frederick II in the 13th century (Ferragina 2009, 143; Huysseune 2019, 12, 2003). In contrast in the North, ”collective life in the civic regions is eased by the expectation that others will probably follow the rules” (Putnam, Leonardo, and Nanetti 1993, 111). In both, Putnam and Banfield, culture remains an essentialist and primordial category attributed to early childhood socialization. Not surprisingly Banfield’s and Putnam’s arguments have been used politically, first in the US in the cultures of poverty discourse that racialized poor communities and later in Italy by the Lega Nord against southern Italians (Huysseune 2019, 13). Italian scholars have criticized Banfield’s approach for feeding and using stereotypes and for largely disregarding the historical developments of southern Italy (Ferragina 2009, 142). Scholars pointed to the weakness of anthropological fieldwork carried out by a scholar who barely spoke Italian (Kertzer 2007), the disregarding of socio-economic factors like the Southern Italian land tenure system or the existence of ‘dark’ (Levi 1996, 52) social capital in the Italian South like the mafias. The eminent Italian political scientist and sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno (1966) argued that the Italian peasants that Banfield observed in their rational self-maximizing behavior were in fact not acting any different from the British middle class in the 1960s (Huysseune 2019, 5). The major charge went against Banfield’s ” sketchiest interest in Italy itself, its history, as that of Chiaramonte remains almost entirely absent from the book” (Huysseune 2019, 5; Muraskin 1974, 1495). Making it a classic example of ”northern social theory” (Huysseune 2019) produced by scholars at the center concerned with problems of the center promoting orientalist descriptions through outdated ”ethnocentric” models (Huysseune 2019, 2, 10).

That such essentialist simplistic cultural approaches do not hold much water show recent experiments on tax morale comparing Italians and British. Both countries have similar tax systems but differ in their tax evasion rates. Britain has an intermediate evasion rate, compared to other OECD countries, while Italy’s evasion rate is extraordinarily high (twice the British rates). The expectation was that Italians would be also less willing to pay taxes in the experiments.

Surprisingly, in the laboratory setting British participants were more likely to cheat with their taxes than Italian subjects (Zhang et al. 2016). While Italians cheat the state more in the real world, they cheat less in the experiments. This finding remained constant even when the tax rate, the severity of punishment, the probability of being audited and the redistribution of the collected tax money were varied. In the experiment, Southern and Northern Italians displayed almost identical behavior when confronted with the same institutions. Similar results were found when compared to experiments in the US and Sweden (D’Attoma 2018; Andrighetto et al. 2016). Italians, despite their real-world evasions being much higher, do not cheat more than Americans, Swedes or British. However, when in the experiments asked to contribute to their own state, Italians started to cheat much more than their US counterparts. The findings go against the thesis of amoral familism and against the traditional negative foreign and domestic ascriptions of the Italian character. The findings suggest that Italians have a moral problem with their state rather than a moral problem with one another and that the great behavioral difference between Northern and Southern Italians emphasized by Banfield and Putnam is hard to pin empirically.

The great Italian social theorists, anthropologists and philosophers such as Benedetto Croce (2004), Antonio Gramsci (2010), Alessandro Pizzorno (1966) or Carlo Tullio-Altan (2000) pin the reasons for the screwed relation between Italians and their state in the incomplete national revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. Recent historiography suggests that at the heart of the problematic relation of Italians and their state institutions lies the rampant state–church conflict, which ‘dealt a devastating blow’ (Riall 2008, 9) to the legitimacy of Italian state institutions from the very beginning.

In the nineteenth century a conflict over citizens’ loyalty between state institutions and the church erupted that arguably reenforced doctrinal positions within Catholicism that facilitated evasive behavior. Religion influences individual behavior through doctrinal prescriptions that vary between different Christian denominations. However, the basic principal doctrinal provisions for individual behavior are reenforced through state–church relations. Doctrine and state–church relations co-evolve (Steinmo 2010) and leave an imprint on one another. In Sweden, the state centrism of Lutheranism became positively reenforced through the early fusion of church and state in the eighteenth century (D’Arcy and Nistotskaya 2018). Subsequently, the information, social networks, personal resources and social disciplining power of the church could be used for tax collection. In Italy, the situation was the opposite. A bitter conflict alienated church and state throughout the nineteenth century and led to a codification of anti-statist Catholic doctrine whose effects can still be felt today in the tax morale of Italians.

Surveys confirm that contemporary Italians trust the church in Italy, even after a sharp decline of religious practice since the 1960s and a series of pedophilia and fiscal scandals, more than most of their state institutions. Throughout the 2000s the pope came out in the top group of institutions that Italians trust most. In 2018 and 2017 the pope claimed first place.⁴ In a list of 15 institutions political parties occupy the last place, while parliament is in 14th place. In 2018, 72% of Italians trusted the pope, while the highest-placed political institution, the president of the Republic, could only achieve 56% and the state only 29% (place 10) (Rapporto Demos & Pi 2018).

That the persuasive power of the church and its historically hostile relation to the state has had an effect on the tax behavior of Italians becomes even more compelling after a look into a special feature of the Italian tax system. It confirms that Italians are more willing to give to what they identify as communitarian institutions (e.g. the Catholic church) than to the state. Since a reform in 1985 (amended in 1998), Italians can indicate on their tax form whether they want to pay the former church tax to another religious community, to the state or continue to pay it to the Catholic church. The so-called ‘otto per mille’ (eight per thousand) law indicates that the money should be used by state or religious communities for the provision of social services. The sum stemming from the ‘otto per mille’ tax amounted in 2012 to 1,148 million Euros. Despite the newly introduced freedom of choice to whom to allocate this sum, 82.24% of Italian tax payers who made use of the ‘otto per mille’ option continued to attribute the money to the Catholic church. In contrast, only 13.35% of Italians gave their money to the state. The percentage of contributions to the state has fallen (1990: 22.31; 2000: 10.28; 2014: 13.35), while the church share has increased (1990: 76.17; 2000: 87.25; 2014: 82.24).

Not only surveys and tax data but also individual accounts point toward a connection between the Italians’ tax evasion and the relationship between church and state: during the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s the journalist Pino Nicotri disguised himself as a corrupt Christian Democratic politician and visited several priests in different parts of Italy in order to ask for advice whether to collaborate with the magistrates and tell them about systematic corruption and tax evasion of politicians. Despite the general call of the Milanese Cardinal Martini to collaborate with the state authorities most priests advised ‘in terms which emphasized private repentance over public justice, private and family duties over public ones’ (Ginsborg 2001, 134). In Naples a priest told the journalist ‘there is the justice of men, but there is a superior justice! … And then think of the consequences of what it [the exposure of his corrupt practices] would mean for your family’ (Ginsborg 2001, 134). Tax evasion was a private matter in which the state had no say.

Religion and tax morale

The literature on tax morale argues that ‘religiosity has a significant positive effect on tax morale, even if other determinants such as corruption, trustworthiness, demographic and economic factors are controlled for’ (Torgler 2006, 83). The higher the religiosity the smaller is the propensity to evade taxes.

What the empirics show on the individual level does not seem to hold on the aggregated level. In continental Europe the countries with the highest religiosity, Greece, Italy and Romania, are those with the highest evasion rates (Table 1). There is also a denominational split: in Protestant countries such as Sweden and the UK evasion is low; in Catholic countries such as Italy it is high. Evasion is highest in Orthodox countries like Greece and Romania.

Table 1. Country, confession, belief in God as percentage of population 2010 and size of the shadow economy 1999–2010.

Country(confession)	Believe in God (%)	Size of the shadow economy (% of GDP)
Romania(Orthodox)	92	28.4
Greece (Orthodox)	79	27
Italy (Catholic)	74	26.9
Sweden (Lutheran)	18	18.6
UK (Anglican)	37	12.5

Data from Eurobarometer (2010) and Schneider and Enste (2013).

This is surprising considering that from a Weberian perspective Orthodox Christianity is considered to be the most solidarity-oriented branch of Christianity, followed closely by Catholicism, considered to be strongly communitarian. In mainline Lutheranism and Calvinism the incentives for individualistic behavior are much stronger. Weber (1988, 96) sees a ‘deep suspicion towards the best friend’ embedded in ascetic Protestant doctrine because ‘only God should be the man of confidence.’ We would expect ascetic Protestants, whose faith provides incentives for individualistic behavior, to be more inclined toward evasive behavior. However, in Catholic and Orthodox nations evasive behavior is far more widespread.

The answer might be that the individualism of ascetic Protestantism was countered by rigid morals and social disciplining mechanisms. These disciplining techniques were not only individual and inward looking but were also pushed for the congregation as a whole. Calvin ordered that each congregation should have a consistory to supervise ‘the morals of the congregation.’ The consistory ‘interviewed individual church members several times a year in order to ascertain whether they were fit to receive communion. Errant members – for example, drunkards, adulterers, wife beaters, and tax cheats – were excluded from communion’ (Gorski 2003, 21). Disciplining was not solely left to the consistory but ‘each individual was not only made responsible for his or her own conduct but was charged to keep a watchful eye over other members of the congregation and to remonstrate with those who strayed from the path of righteousness.’ However, this was not enough for Calvin. He also wanted to transmit discipline beyond the congregation. ‘If the ungodly could not be saved, he reasoned, then they could at least be compelled to obey God’s laws. Together, church and magistrate were to work toward the establishment of a “Christian polity” (res publica christiana) to affect a thoroughgoing Christianization of social life’ (Gorski 2003, 21). In a similar vein, the skeptic view of the individual in mainline Protestantism led to an appreciation of the state and its institutions because humans are ‘saints and sinners at the same time, and that’s why they need to be under an institutional order that disciplines the sinner’ (Reuter 2010). Catholicism has such disciplining elements only within and for the hierarchy of the Catholic church.

The success of Protestant states such as Prussia or the Netherlands that had imported reformed Protestant bureaucrats in the seventeenth century led to an emulation of ‘disciplinary revolutions’ (Gorski 2003) in Catholic countries during the counter-reformation. However, these were arguably bound to fail, due to the softer take of Catholicism on discipline and inner-worldly asceticism. In Catholicism it is not discipline but doing good works that brings you closer to heaven. Donations and alms should go to civil society or church charities, not to the state (Muehlebach 2013). Furthermore, the Catholic sinner has the possibility to repent or to buy indulgences. Hence, being not entirely accurate on one’s tax declaration (fudging) can be corrected through paying alms or confessing.

However, since individuals pay taxes to the state it is not only religious doctrine that provides the ethical frame for their actions but also how this doctrine perceives the state. This is reciprocal, however, since, how a state is perceived by a religion is informed by the severity of the state–church conflict. Hence, we can only understand the impact of religion on taxation if we analyze how state institutions and church doctrine co-evolve throughout history.

The normative grid that religion provides for citizens on how to perceive their state are not carved in stone but are a derivative of how church authorities want the state to be perceived. In contrast to Banfield’s or Putnam’s approaches to culture this is a non-essentialist interpretation of culture that requires a genealogical and historical construction and mapping of the development of such prescriptions. Culture has to be approached as a moving target by the researcher. It is constantly changing and being reformulated by political and social actors. It requires a close reading of how politicians tap into this changing cultural reservoir (often selectively) to further their electoral success and their policy aims.

The state- and nation-building process sets the stage for the relationship between religion and state. In Sweden, the early fusion of church and state led to a mutual reinforcing of the state-centric view of Protestantism. The state was seen as something good, priests were paid by the state and they were used for tax collection. Priests became public servants and their payroll depended on the tax base of the state (D’Arcy and Nistotskaya 2017).

In the Catholic world, things were different. The Vatican already had a state and a territory. The theocracy occupied one third of the Italian peninsula. The nation- and state-builders took the territory and cut religious prerogatives. This alienated the church. And there was a second problem: nation- and state-builders in Italy were Liberals, hence all they stood for was anathema to the Catholic church. The ideas of liberal state builders and the Catholic church co-evolved in response to one another in light of the heavy state–church conflict and the outcome was detrimental for tax morale in Italy.

Church and state in nineteenth-century Italy

The alienation between church and state and state and citizens in Italy started with the Napoleonic occupation. Following the French Revolution, Napoleon crossed the Alps and occupied northern Italy. Napoleon established two satellite states: the Kingdom of Italy in the North and the Kingdom of Naples in the South. The rest of the peninsula (the states around the Apennine spine) became départements réunis incorporated into French territory and under French rule (the former territories of the House of Savoy, Genoa, Parma, Piacenza and Tuscany). In 1808 Napoleon occupied Rome and subsequently the main territories of the Papal States (Ancona, Macerata, Fermo, Urbino).

With occupation Napoleon unleashed a ‘War on Religion’ (Broers 2004). Napoleon eliminated ecclesiastical privileges. He confiscated and sold church land, introduced civil marriage and divorce, introduced freedom of religion, dismissed religious orders and claimed the right to nominate Bishops. In 1809 the Pope excommunicated Napoleon. For centuries, the church had been a source of information and a tool for social control for Italian political leaders who collaborated with the Vatican. Now a French senior official commented that the church’s use of ‘the conscience to manipulate human passion’ made it ‘ever more dangerous.’ After the excommunication of Napoleon ‘the rupture with the church turned into an active source of fear for the French’ (Broers 2003, 707). The situation was exacerbated further when the pope was taken into confinement. However, in Italy unlike in France, Napoleon failed in taming the church. The historian Broers called the relationship between Napoleon and the pope a ‘story of a Napoleonic defeat to rival that of 1812 in Russia, or indeed Waterloo’ (Broers 2004, 6).

Napoleon did not only have pope and clergy pinned against him but soon also the rest of the population, especially the lower social strata. A principle reason was Napoleon’s regime of fiscal extraction. Napoleon needed money and resources for his extended European military campaigns. The satellite states and the départements réunis were used for financial extraction and for filling the ranks of the Napoleonic army. Between 1802 and 1811 Napoleon doubled the expenses of the Kingdom of Italy. In 1804 half of the budget went to the Italian army, which was integrated into the Napoleonic army, and these contributions increased steadily between 1804 and 1811.

To cover the rising costs and the increasing demands from France, Giuseppe Prina, the finance minister of the Kingdom of Italy, enacted a series of reforms to extract revenue. These reforms were highly successful. Italy, in comparison to other continental European countries, had one of the most modern tax and finance systems at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Grab 1998, 128).

However, the extraction of fiscal resources, the streamlining of the taxation and conscription apparatus had negative effects for the population. The selling of church land had resulted in land concentration and the countryside became increasingly enclosed (Grab 1995, 42). The result was a huge landless proletariat of day laborers, cut off from their traditional subsistence farming.

The Napoleonic thirst for territorial conquest in Europe was forever increasing the financial demands on the Italian satellite states. The ‘French financial pressure resulted in an increasingly heavy tax burden that threatened to alienate the Italian population and undermine political and social stability’ (Broers 2001, 155; Grab 1998, 128).

Giuseppe Prina, the finance minister and Napoleon’s man for tax collection, had to increase taxes but disproportionately targeted the lower social strata, as landowners were essential for the political backing of the regime (Grab 1998, 133). The tassa personale (an income tax payed by all male citizens between 15 and 60) was augmented and indirect consumption taxes (dazio consume) on products such as candles, flour, hay and vegetables were introduced in walled cities. The prices for salt and tobacco, both state monopolies, were increased (Grab 1995, 43).

However, to fulfill Napoleon’s needs it was not enough to increase taxation. Taxes also had to be collected. Giuseppe Prina reformed the collection system by creating the Guardia di Finanza and introducing a highly centralized and effective system with strong incentives for tax collectors to bring in taxes. Collectors were appointed through public tenders. They received renewable, three-year contracts with competitive remuneration, but had to leave a deposit at the beginning of their term. The tax collector was liable for the uncollected money at the end of the term. What he did not collect was subtracted from his deposit. After the reform, in 1808, only 1.3% of personal tax remained uncollected (Grab 1998, 140).

Landholders payed their taxes because they had a favorable fiscal contract with the regime: little taxation in exchange for political support. But personal taxes were a problem. Responsibility for the collection lay with the comuni, which often turned a blind eye to tax evasion. The result was that in 1811 ‘out of a population of 5 668 457 tax was paid by 1 542 998’ (Grab 1998, 134).

The tax increases, the disproportionality of the tax burden on the lower social strata and the rigid enforcement of tax collection made the Napoleonic reforms unpopular. In 1809 Prina introduced a new milling tax. It was the straw to break the camel’s back. The milling tax was incredibly complicated and bureaucratic. People started to revolt. The tax collectors’ houses were ransacked and the tax records burned. ‘The authorities also ordered the clergy to preach against crime’ (Grab 1995, 48), but the regime had alienated the church too much. Instead, ‘many lower clerics defied the authorities and supported law violators’ (Grab 1995, 57). Sometimes priests were directly involved in the revolts. The Napoleonic regime answered with harsh repression. Two thousand people were killed in the year 1809 alone. The ever-increasing tax burden, the low share of these tax revenues delegated to public expenditure (84.7 million lire of the budget was allocated to the army; see Table 2), the disproportionate taxation of the people and the low taxes for landowners as well as the increasingly coercive extraction apparatus alienated the population from the tax system and the state. In 1814 Giuseppe Prina, the finance minister of the Napoleonic satellite regime and the mastermind behind the tax system and extraction apparatus, was thrown out of the window of his house in Milan by an angry mob and brutally killed.

Table 2. Budgetary allocations in millions of lire in 1811.

Departments	Expenses
War and tax for the French Army	84.7
Interior	16.6
Finance	3.1
Treasury	2.0
Justice	7.6
Foreign Relations	0.8
Religion	0.2
Public debt	21.0

Data from Grab (1998).

Risorgimento and Anti-Risorgimento

The spiral of alienation between centralizing state authorities and the population did not end once Napoleon was defeated. After the fall of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna restored the Papal States and the other eight pre-invasion states. Nevertheless, the Napoleonic legacy, as hated as it was for its repressive character, had also left an enduring modernizing imprint on Italy. The ‘Napoleonic administration provided a model to Italian states during the post-Napoleonic period’ (Grab 1995, 64). Moreover, the spirit of the French Revolution that Napoleon had brought to Italy had left a mark on Italian society beyond his fall. Liberal ideas started to grow and flourish, first in debating clubs and later in preliminary political associations across the peninsula. The Risorgimento had started and the national-liberal movement grew rapidly. Even in the Papal States, Gregory XVI enacted a series of liberal reforms in the 1840s.

The spread of a series of revolutions across the peninsula in 1848 put a sudden end to the liberal tendencies within the Vatican. Piedmont enacted the Statuto Albertino, the first liberal constitution in Italy, which foresaw a separation of state and church, and this made the Vatican embark on a wholesale counter-revolution. The Anti-Risorgimento started. It was a war over public opinion and moral high ground, supported by novels as well as sophisticated socio-economic treaties that even included provisions for a just Catholic taxation regime, to counter the appeal of the Statuto and delegitimize liberalism.

Antonio Bresciani, a Jesuit novelist, was recruited to lead the literary attack on the liberal forces that had started to unify Italy. In the 1840s and 1850s he published a trilogy (L’Ebreo di Verona, Della Repubblica Romana, Lionello) that established a wider discourse against secularist forces and framed the church’s fight against the national-liberal movement in an exciting literary format (murder, rape, love, betrayal were all central themes in the novels). Chapters from the books were published as preview and serial stories in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit periodical, at that time the paper with the widest circulation in Italy. The Risorgimento was portrayed as the result of a ‘satanistically inspired conspiracy by secret societies’ (Dickie 2017). Liberals and nationalists would bring ‘moral corruption, political disorder and devil worship’ (Dickie 2017, 3). The secularism and liberalism of the French Revolution and the Risorgimento were connected to Protestantism and pinned to the heinous motives of a foreign occupation and invasion (Logan 1997, 55).

Indeed, the Risorgimento was a very popular movement in Protestant nations. In the United States and Great Britain, Garibaldi, Mazzini and other central figures of the Risorgimento were worshipped because they were perceived as the heroes in a fight against the ‘tyrannical and corrupt power of the papacy’ and ‘what they saw as the superstitious and non-Christian practices of the Roman Catholic Church’ (Raponi 2011, 1186). In return the Jesuits portrayed the Risorgimento as a foreign Protestant invasion, alien and unable to grasp the concept of the real Italian society and therefore bound to fail (Romani 2013, 30).

The liberal ideal state and nation was portrayed as mechanistic, soulless and scary ‘Moloch’ (Taparelli D’Azeglio [1856] 1971, 598–601) made up of isolated egoistic individuals and juxtaposed to the organic interpretation of a Catholic Italy made up of ‘ascending conflations of cellular structures, with the family as the primary cell and local communities as intermediate components’ (Logan 1997, 55), where everyone is connected through brotherhood, love and the concept of charity (Romani 2013). The paese reale (the moral majority of Catholic citizens) was idealized against the paese legale (liberal rule of law and institutions). La Civiltà Cattolica called the new liberal regime a ‘guasto ideale permanente’ (permanent idealist damage) of ‘edonismo’ (hedonism) and ‘paganismo’ (paganism) (Curci [1859] 1971], 1).

From the 1850s onwards a dense network of Catholic thinkers was working hard on delegitimizing the territorially growing liberal state of Piedmont. On the other side, moderate liberals tried to include Catholic symbols into their nation-building agenda and to formulate a symbiosis between patria and Catholicism. This was encountered with fierce resistance by the extremist Catholic camp, the so-called ultramontanes and intransigents. These developed between the 1840s and 1870s a state theory that included a decisive theocratic element. There could be no Italian state without supremacy of the Pope over it (Romani 2014).

The ecclesiastical reforms in Piedmont and in the territories that were assumed by Piedmont from the 1850s onwards fueled the church–state conflict. A series of wars between 1860 and 1870 took away ever more territory from the Pope. In 1870 the Papal States had shrunk from one third of the Italian peninsula to the city walls of Rome. When territorial unification was finalized in 1871, the Pope had lost Rome and found himself confined to the walls of the Vatican City.

If the church could no longer have its territory, then the Italian state should not have full control over Italians either. For his political counterstrike the Pope crafted powerful weapons. He aimed at destabilizing the new nation state. From the 1860s onwards the Catholic church ‘did all it could to rob the Italian state of its legitimacy’ (Kertzer 2000, 205).

To harm the state, two myths were crafted that still endure today. The new state was framed as an illegitimate usurper state (myth number one) and the Pope was portrayed as being held prisoner by the new state in the Vatican (myth number two) (Kertzer 2000, 410). The two myths were flanked by three sets of doctrinal reforms.

First, Pius IX issued the encyclical Quanta Cura in 1864 containing the Syllabus of Errors, which ‘upheld the temporal power of his Holiness, denounced liberalism as an anathema, and made Catholicism incompatible with nationalism’ (Kelikian 2002, 46). The syllabus argued fiercely against the abolition of the ‘temporal power of which the Apostolic See is possessed’ (Pope Pius IX 1864, 76) and declared it also as wrong that ‘[i]n the case of conflicting laws enacted by the two powers, the civil law prevails’ (Pope Pius IX 1864, 42). Pollard comments that ‘[g]iven the strictures of the Syllabus, “Liberal Catholic” seemed almost a contradiction in terms’ (Pollard 2008, 28).

The second step was the creation of papal infallibility. In an internally highly contested move, the Pope strengthened his grip on the church apparatus. This did not only go against the liberal Zeitgeist but also against the strong resistance of some of the approximately 600 Cardinals that came to Rome. It gave Pius IX unprecedented centralized powers over Catholicism.

A third important doctrinal innovation of Pius IX was the Non Expedite (Kertzer 2000, 193; Pollard 2008, 22). The Pope instructed that Catholics should abstain from any political involvement. Catholics could neither run for public office, nor elect politicians in the Italian state.

In a society where Catholic religion encompassed virtually the whole population, which had hosted the power center of Christianity for over a millennium and where it was still necessary to bring a recommendation letter from the local parish priest in order to get a job in the 1950s, the Pope’s proclamations did not go unnoticed. No ordinary Italians, if they did not want to risk excommunication, gave the Italian state their loyalty. Italy witnessed the emergence of mutually exclusive identities and loyalties from which the willingness to pay taxes suffered.

Just Catholic taxation

The Anti-Risorgimento was not only a popular war over hearts and minds and one of political moves but also led to a specific reformulation of Catholic socio-economic thinking in Italy. Central to this was the Jesuit Taparelli d’Azeglio, who developed an alternative to the liberal-rationalist-political economic thinking. In a series of articles published between 1850 and 1870 in La Civiltà Cattolica, the periodical with the widest circulation in Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, he worked out a counterproposal to the liberal state in which a Catholic idea of taxation played a key role (Taparelli D’Azeglio 1854, 252–255).

The baseline of Taparelli’s critique was that the new Italian state taxed too much and redistributed only to itself. Tax revenue was eaten up by the constant expansion of state tasks and by its administrative and political elites. Little was left for the people.

Excessive taxation without redistribution was not only a practical and administrative problem but also a theocratic problem. The excessive taxation of the liberal state, so Taparelli said, put the whole Catholic model of ascendance and social cohesion at risk. The rich, if taxed too much, would refrain from giving alms. This would lead to a collapse of the Catholic poor relief system (opere pie) which was based on alms-giving by the higher social strata (Ferrera 1993). It would forestall the classic Catholic reciprocal way to heaven where the rich go to heaven for good works (alms-giving) and the beggar assures his ascendance by praying for him.

Taparelli d’Azeglio discussed the negative effects of the centralization of the tax system in detail. Taxation should be locally administered and the tax burden should be locally assessed (Taparelli D’Azeglio 1854, 338–339). He railed against the ‘limitless increase of imposts, enacted without scruples and payed by the lowest social classes.’ New assessments of property that the new state wanted to introduce for taxation such as the cadaster were marked as the result of the ‘spirito geometrizzatore’ (Romani 2010, 38) of the French Revolution. Taparelli pointed out that the ‘state of the church had lived easily without cadaster for a thousand years’ (Romani 2013, 15). Instead, taxes should be assessed by ‘applying the book of nature’ (Romani 2013, 23), by local authorities in line with the subsidiarity principle.

The anti-Risorgimento did not only create a counterproposal to the Liberal state that went all the way down to the tax code but also railed officially against it. La Civiltà Cattolica never tired of ‘denouncing the systematic and illegitimate withdrawal from the public budget by politicians and administrators’ (Romani 2013, 38). Taxation was framed as ‘state robbery’ and for Liberatore, one of the top writers for La Civiltà Cattolica, ‘A government that robs from the church, makes its own subjects thieves’ because ‘[t]he government says: the property of the church, belongs to the state, and therefore the citizen says the property of the state belongs to the people, and part of the people am I’ (Romani 2013, 33). Leopardi, another editor of La Civiltà Cattolica claimed that ‘[a] liberal is nothing but the slave to every guilty passion’ (Leopardi 1832 [2004], 307). And for the Jesuit Ballerini, liberals were all ‘natural egoists’ and therefore prone to evade and fill their pockets (Ballerini 1876, 9).

The domestic dispute over the right tax regime and the moral right to tax was even noticed on the international diplomatic stage. The British chargé d’affaires in Rome concluded in 1893 in a letter to the Foreign Secretary that ‘tax avoidance “is not considered in this country to be dishonest action nor even an evasion of a patriotic duty”’ (cited in Duggan 2007, 339). In post-unification Italy, approximately ‘75% of all taxes went unpaid’ (Duggan 2007, 339).

Reconciliation? State and church from Mussolini to Democrazia Cristiana

Before coming to power, Mussolini was not fond of Catholicism. He was not religious, not married and his children were named after two important heretics. He wrote a slightly blasphemous novel in his early days (The Cardinal’s Mistress) and demanded in his first political program the confiscation of church property (Mack-Smith 1997, 378). His major fascist ideologists Gentile, Solmi and Rocco had more affinity with Catholicism but only insofar as they saw great potential in exploiting its legitimizing power for the regime (Logan 1997, 57–58).

Hence, at the beginning, anti-clericalism prevailed within the fascist movement. The Lateran treaties came about because Mussolini realized after 1922 that he could not govern the country against the will of the church (Duggan 2013, 207–208). From that point onwards he did everything to get on good terms with the Vatican (Mack-Smith 1997, 378). Mussolini married, baptized his children and started to prepare the Lateran Treaties, which ended the 70 years of diplomatic hostility that had continued since unification.

The Lateran Treaties between state and church were enacted in 1929. They guaranteed the church a number of strong prerogatives in religious education, the taxation of church enterprises and estates. The treaties recognized the sovereignty of the Vatican and in return the church accepted the existence of the Italian state (Mack-Smith 1997, 379).

However, when Mussolini dissolved the Catholic scout movement in 1927 against his former promise, and integrated it into the fascist youth movements, the Vatican became cautious (Mack-Smith 1997, 372). The Lateran pacts were still signed a year later but relations became frosty when Mussolini adopted the German racial laws in Italy in 1938. The Vatican knew now that the regime was drifting toward totalitarianism and, following the developments in Germany, the Pope saw that the effects could become uncontrollable for the church. The Vatican pulled the plug when a series of war defeats weakened Mussolini and led to a disassociation of the conservative Italian establishment. Mussolini was toppled and arrested, and with the church pulling some of the strings in this operation, it positioned itself well for the coming post-regime and postwar order.

Pius XI had called Mussolini ‘the man sent by providence’ (Clark 1996, 255). The Pope saw in the fascist dictator a man with whom the church could reach beneficial agreements. However, the relationship between fascism and church did not go beyond self-interest. Once neither side needed the other, the relationship broke down. Catholicism did not embrace the fascist Italian state. It did not become a clerical dictatorship like Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal. Even with the Lateran Treaties in place the fascist state remained for Catholic thinkers only a paese legale, not organically anchored in the Catholic identity of the paese reale (Logan 1997, 55). Hence, there was no decisive drop in tax evasion (Santoro 2010, 35). Tax morale remained so low that Mussolini himself had to address the issue in a speech in 1928 where he referred to evaders as ‘the worst parasites of national society’ (cited in Selmi 2013, 9).

The end of fascism and German occupation brought Italy its first long-lasting democratic regime. The fascist experience and the World War led in Italy, as in many other continental European countries, to a steep resurgence in religiosity (Mammarella 1978). Having abandoned Mussolini early enough the Catholic church had positioned itself well for the postwar era. The newly formed Christian Democratic party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) became the central reference point in Italian politics. The Christian Democrats stayed in government without interruption for over 50 years, longer than any other party in a democratic state. Tax evasion dropped but from the 1970s onwards evasion rates started to increase again.

The party evolved out of the Catholic subcultures in the Italian North. In the white regions of Lombardy, Piedmont and Veneto over 80% of the population attended mass on a regular basis in the 1950s (in contrast to 50% as the national average). Social and economic life was centered around the local parish and ‘religion, social life and economic development all seemed closely intertwined’ (Galli 1978). In the 1950s and 1960s on literally every main square of Italian villages the visitor would find the local office of the Christian Democrats next to the church, usually boasting an attached bar with a license to serve alcohol. Through its strong local roots, facilitated both through the Catholic clergy and the local party apparatus, the party was able to create a direct connection to Rome to make sure that local demands were met (Galli 1978). Thanks to the Christian Democrats, the Italian state was for the first time becoming locally tangible for its citizens and could achieve legitimacy (Galli 1978). This was a very different relationship between citizens and state than during the liberal period where liberal political elites were constantly afraid of the Catholic masses and therefore did not extend the franchise beyond 4%. The party ensured that the local Catholic communities had for the first time since Italian unification a reason to pay their taxes.

In the 1950s and 1960s tax evasion in Italy remained low, compared to the previous period. Through the DC Catholics could hold the state accountable for what it did with their money and, given the party’s coherent Catholic ideology, it could even be sure that what the state did was in line with their ethical values and political worldview. However, at the beginning of the 1970s, the evasion rates started to climb again because the peaceful coexistence between church and state that the Christian Democratic party had enabled came to an end.

During the 1960s the traditional Catholic subcultures had already started to weaken, both through changes in society (secularization) and through a turbulent reform process in the Vatican itself (at the Second Vatican Council) (Melloni 2007). The DC began to lose votes. To balance this, it started to shift its center of electoral gravity from the white Catholic zones in the North to Southern Italy. The weak territorial organization of the Italian church in the South meant that the Christian Democrats here could not secure their votes through a clerico-political connection (Garelli 2007, 21). Having occupied the state for over two decades they now started to use it as a gigantic spoils machine to distribute resources to their voters in the South. The Christian Democrats changed from being a ‘church-sponsored party’ to a ‘state-sponsored party’ (Diamanti and Ceccarini 2007, 41; Katz and Mair 1995). The party shifted its ‘political array of choices on offer, from the realm of values to the domain of interests,’ hence, from Catholicism to clientelism (Diamanti and Ceccarini 2007). The party quickly drifted into rampant corruption, which included deals with organized crime in the South (Guzzini 1995).

In the South, tax evasion skyrocketed as the Christian Democrats turned a blind eye to the evasive behavior of their electorate (Guzzini 1995). The consequence was a need for heavy fiscal transfers from North to South where it made Northern citizens ever less prone to paying their taxes.

The clientelist patronage practices of the DC in the south also led to a distancing between Christian Democrats and Vatican from the 1970s onwards. The increasing reliance on a spoils system of the DC in the Italian South posed moral stress on its reputation amongst the Northern Catholic electorate (Ignazi and Wellhofer 2013). Paul VI’s encyclical Octiogesima adveniens from 1971 implied that the Christian Democrats were no longer the sole representation of the Catholic vote. Another acceleration of the alienation came through two lost referendums on abortion and divorce in the 1970s (Bardi 1981). Both referendums were perceived by parts of the Catholic church in Italy as a deep ethical and moral crisis and blamed on the too progressive transformations of parts of the Catholic subculture and the Christian Democratic party in the aftermath of Vatican II. In the 1980s conservative Catholics like Rocco Buttiglione launched accusations of ‘neo-Protestantism” (Buttigione and Scola 1984) that allegedly had taken possession of parts of the Christian Democrats, Catholic Action and the Catholic Scout movement (Buttigione and Scola 1984). The DC and the strategy of “mediation”, of church influence on politics through the Christian Democratic party, was identified as non-adequate to cope with secularization trends in Italian society. Instead, a “’Catholic Reconquista’ of public opinion and political clout” (Santagata 2014, 443) was launched that should lead to “a renewed political commitment, a defence of Christian values and a direct relationship between the Church and political power” (Santagata 2014, 443). For these objectives, support for the Italian state and its institutions could be abandoned and the focus could be shifted toward promoting new forms of subsidiarity.

The CEI, the Italian bishops conference under its new leader cardinal Ruini, became the new political center of Italian Catholicism. The new strategy, commonly understood as ‘Ruinismo’ (Livi 2016, 401), included a list of 10 non-negotiable Catholic values, a check list for Catholic voters to match party programs, to see whether Italian politicians pursue Catholic politics (Ratzinger 2002). The aim was an ‘anthropological turn’ (Santagata 2014, 445), in the worlds of Cardinal Ruini ‘safeguarding and promoting certain fundamental ethical and anthropological matters’ (Ruini 2004, 5). Whomever delivered on the ten values was to receive benevolent electoral recommendations by the Vatican.

After the DC imploded in the 1990s in a corruption scandal Silvio Berlusconi launched Forza Italia to fill the void (Hien 2020). The first party platform’s socioeconomic ideology was one ‘of new right liberalism, with talks of slimming down the role of the state, measures to encourage private enterprise and tax cuts’ (Hopkin and Paolucci 1999, 325). The man put in charge to develop the economic side of the party platform was Antonio Martino, an economist trained by Milton Friedman in Chicago, and between 1988 and 1990 president of the Mont Pelerin society (HAEU 1998, 10). Consequently, in the run-up to the elections Berlusconi expressed more than once ‘the need to put the state on a diet’ (Berlusconi cited in Semino and Masci 1996, 257). The anti-statism of Berlusconi was reinforced through his anti-communist rhetoric which was welcomed by the church (Orsina 2017).

The state was, in contrast to the period from 1945 to the late 1970s, no longer a prime concern for the Vatican. Subsidiarity was the keyword and the aim of the church was to reconquer society through a dense net of civil society organizations. Less state was therefore welcomed by the church because it gave more room for expansion. The new neoliberalism of Berlusconi created a perverted match (Hien 2013) with the churches’ new strategy.

A manifestation of this new strategy was the remodeling of Lombardy welfare according to the subsidiarity principle under governor Roberto Formigoni who was a frontman of the catholic grassroots organization Communione e Liberazione. Welfare reform in Lombardy should trigger an encompassing shift toward church run charitable and welfare service providers which would resemble the 19th century Italian opere pie system (Muehlebach 2013). Without the need for a strong state, controlled by the Christian Democrats, taxation and tax morale that had been fostered actively by the church in the post war period, was no longer of central importance for the church. Instead, a weak state seemed better, since it enabled the expansion of the church’s charitable civil society apparatus. The church did not engage in an active delegitimization of the state as in the 19th century but rather silently accepted tax evasion of Italians.

One of the major campaign items of Berlusconi and arguable the basis of his electoral success in the 1990sand 2000s was his tax policy. His election campaigns were ripe with pledges for tax reductions (Campus 2006). And while the center-left’s slogan was ”pagare tutti per pagare meno” (pay all to pay less) Berlusconi’s claim was ”pagare meno per pagare tutti” (pay less to pay all) (Berlusconi cited in Guano 2010, 379). Berlusconi called his voters to a ”sciopero fiscale” (tax strike) and enacted in 2003 a total fiscal amnesty (Guano 2010, 384). For Berlusconi, tax evasion was a ”natural” (CNN 2011), and even a ”God given right” (US Today 2012). During his times as prime minister tax evasion skyrocketed without any moral protests by the Catholic Church. Central to the alliance between Berlusconi and the church was his pledge to abolish the homeowner tax and this included a promise to also leave the homeowner tax exemptions of the Catholic church (one of the largest real estate owners in Italy) untouched.

Conclusion

This paper started by showing that the findings of recent tax compliance experiments were at odds with the thesis of amoral familism and other negative ascriptions to the Italian character.

Alternative to essentialist cultural approaches that have done much damage this article conceptualized culture as historical construct changing over time and used as a repertoire that needs a careful historical genealogical reconstruction. The role of religion as a moralizing force is central in such processes. The contribution showed how moral arguments against taxation that could be used to legitimize freeriding were in Italy strongly reenforced through the fierce state–church conflict during the formation phase of the modern Italian state in the 19th century. The deep hostility that the unification of Italy created between state and church led to a legitimization of cheating the state for Catholics.

Much has been written on the absence of good public goods provision especially in southern Italy as the basis for the low tax morale of Italians. The cultural genealogical approach that this paper took toward the legitimizing role of religion is not necessarily at odds with such contractual arguments echoing Margaret Levi. In reality both exist in parallel and are mutually reinforcing.

Weak public goods provision flanked by a anti state discourse by the church is double as hard to overcome than only weak public goods provision. I would even argue that it is doubtable that the best public goods provision could have helped the Italian state to collect taxes against the will of the catholic church. The question for the future is what role religion plays in creating tax morale in the 21st century where western Europe sees strong secularization tendencies. Is there a transposition process at work that makes tax moral work also without religion? The Swedish case would indicate this but more research is certainly necessary in the future.

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Josef Hien

Josef Hien works as a political scientist at Mid Sweden University and the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm. Before joining Mid Sweden he has been a scholar at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, the University of Milan, the Colllegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, the European University Institute and the University of Stockholm. Josef is interested in the role of culture, religion and ideas. His latest publications are Hien, J. (2020) A Cultural Political Economy Approach to the European Crisis. Journal of Common Market Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13017 and Hien, J. (2020) European Integration and the Reconstitution of Socio-economic Ideologies: Protestant Ordoliberalism vs Social Catholicism. Journal of European Public Policy. DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2020.1758753