Abstract

Although recent decades have seen increased scholarly interest in associations, analysis of this sector has long suffered from a lack of data in Italy. The situation has now changed, however: there exist a variety of data sources which enable analysis of trends in association membership. However, still lacking is a study which considers these sources all together and compares their results. The article remedies this shortcoming by analysing association membership in Italy on the basis of survey data. After the features and general trends in the phenomenon are described in Section 2, the second part of the article considers the differences among regions (Section 3) and assesses some of the factors responsible for them (Sections 4 and 5).