Abstract

Mezzogiorno – the Italian South – is a famous paradigm in social sciences: underdeveloped and devoid of civic culture. By studying the participation of citizens in voluntary associations, we put to test a more nuanced interpretation of the internal heterogeneity of Southern and Insular regions. We follow the basic assumption of the social embeddedness theory, according to which volunteering is a context- dependent phenomenon, by addressing the intricacy of possible relationships between the heterogeneities of territorial contexts and the diversified patterns of volunteering. A comparative analysis of the regional level data and their initial contextualization against a set of indicators for the most widely accredited predictors of propensity to volunteer, shows that the Italian South is actually a mosaic of different civic cultures. This stimulates us to propose further in depth and comparative studies of the varieties of volunteering as embedded in territorial contexts.