The debate over religious change in Italy is far from having reached unanimous conclusions: some scholars underline an unbroken trend toward a decrease of religiosity, while other scholars highlight the signs of a religious revival especially in younger generations. Beside difficulties of definitions, such different conclusions are also due to the lack of information on a sufficiently long period of time. In the paper this problem is tackled developing a pooled analysis of repeated cross-section surveys that spans over four decades. Using different studies (Eurobarometer, Issp, Evs, Ess, Itanes - Italian National Election Studies, Istat Multipurpose Household Survey), the article analyzes secularization trend in Italy on the basis of church attendance, that despite well-founded criticism keeps being a vital indicator of this phenomenon. Our results show that the trend of attendance to the mass in Italy has decreased since the 1960s until today, despite a period of stability at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The overall trend looks like a lying “S” trend (decrease up to the Seventies, stability in the Eighties, decrease afterwards in the 2000s). Thus the revival hypothesis is not corroborated.
Partecipazione alla messa e cambiamento religioso in Italia (1968-2010). Dibattito teorico, problemi metodologici e risultati empirici
Vezzoni, Cristiano
2013-01-01
Abstract
The debate over religious change in Italy is far from having reached unanimous conclusions: some scholars underline an unbroken trend toward a decrease of religiosity, while other scholars highlight the signs of a religious revival especially in younger generations. Beside difficulties of definitions, such different conclusions are also due to the lack of information on a sufficiently long period of time. In the paper this problem is tackled developing a pooled analysis of repeated cross-section surveys that spans over four decades. Using different studies (Eurobarometer, Issp, Evs, Ess, Itanes - Italian National Election Studies, Istat Multipurpose Household Survey), the article analyzes secularization trend in Italy on the basis of church attendance, that despite well-founded criticism keeps being a vital indicator of this phenomenon. Our results show that the trend of attendance to the mass in Italy has decreased since the 1960s until today, despite a period of stability at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The overall trend looks like a lying “S” trend (decrease up to the Seventies, stability in the Eighties, decrease afterwards in the 2000s). Thus the revival hypothesis is not corroborated.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione