In an age characterized by radical electoral change, often leading to disruptive political developments, the whole area of political science that deals with the chain of representation – the one that connects citizens to parties (and governments) through elections – has been seriously challenged. Cleavage theories and ideological understandings that had served us well for decades have been proving less and less useful in recent years, as testified by the proliferation of new frameworks (from ‘populism’ to new cleavages, to issue competition). It is in this difficult and challenging context for our discipline that Come cambiano gli italiani comes with perfect timing, providing a wealth of information (and some potentially controversial interpretations: see below) about the values and attitudes of Italian citizens. Fitting well within the contemporary perspective of political science, that has fully incorporated survey research as one of its most powerful research tools, the book leverages: (1) a pooled dataset of Italian respondents to five waves of European Values Study (EVS)/World Values Survey (WVS) surveys, between 1981 and 2018; (2) an impressive team of contributors, including both senior and junior scholars from various Italian and international universities; (3) leadership by three scholars that – besides being national EVS and WVS coordinators – have led through the years projects such as the Italian National Election Studies and the True European Voter.

The book starts (p. 8) by clarifying how all chapters share two essential goals: the first (well captured by the book title) is to provide an effective description of change (across time) of key cultural orientations of Italian respondents; the second (less evident in the title) is to trace a sort of deeper change, i.e. change in the relationships that connect these cultural orientations to other personal characteristics and values. This latter question is just as interesting, such as in the example of how, among younger generations, education is losing is classic role in predicting differences in political interest, so that – against the predictions of cognitive mobilization theory – overall increases in education rates do not lead to overall increases in political interest (Chapter 10). These two goals are systematically pursued across 17 chapters, that give this book unique breadth and reveal its importance for our understanding of contemporary political developments. After a first chapter on structural and demographic change, chapters follow dedicated to attitudes towards: life priorities; work; family; religion; libertarianism and civic attitudes; post-materialism; environment; science; social and political participation; military service; institutions; political leadership; state vs. market; corruption; immigration; social distance and interpersonal trust. All chapters present results in easily accessible form, often using simple tables and charts that compare descriptives or summary indices by time and/or by key individual variables; multivariate regression analyses – when used – are presented through simple effect plots.

At the same time, the book does not escape the challenge of some overarching interpretation of change. Here the perspective is essentially anchored (Introduction, pp. 9–15) by two potentially rival frameworks. On the one hand, classic Inglehartian social modernization theory, with its trajectory where increasing security of life conditions leads to change in value priorities beyond primary needs, towards self-fulfillment and emancipation from social hierarchies and norms. On the other hand, a potentially rival approach assigning a key role to institutions (see obviously March and Olsen), where the novelty is not only introduced by emphasis on social and political context, but also by a higher importance of agency: individual attitudes and behavior are not simply driven by conformism (as internalization of social norms), but become actions and reactions (by relatively aware individuals) to the constraints and incentives provided by the institutional context. Difference between perspectives is clear when e.g. thinking about rival explanations of trends of change in political participation, either related to long-term processes of modernization (e.g. increases in education) or alternatively to the (end of) mobilization strategies pursued by political parties in postwar decades of strong ideological polarization (p. 12).

These two rival theoretical anchorings offer an effective compass for navigating results across different chapters. A good example is offered by Chapter 14 (state-market attitudes). This chapter starts by showing the presence of overall stability on intermediate positions (with a dominance of more individualistic stances on the conditionality of unemployment benefits; and a dominance of state responsibility in providing for citizens); but then documents clear signs of change across time and generations, that point towards a much clearer effect of historical contexts, compared to a social modernization hypothesis. In particular, pro-market attitudes show an almost constant decrease across generations (p. 286), moving from more pro-market, older generations – socialized in decades of steady economic growth and wide availability of quality jobs – to younger generations with more pro-state attitudes. Context appears key, but at least in two different nuances: on the one hand, younger generations are those that have experienced several phases of economic stagnation from the 1970s on, with scarcity of quality jobs and more uncertain perspectives (economic context); but, on the other hand, those generations have also been socialized in decades of larger welfare state (institutions), thus developing higher expectations towards state support. And analyses across time show even the presence of a period effect (p. 284): with pro-market support recording its peak in the 1999 wave (years of economic growth), and its lowest in 2009 (beginning of the Great Recession). Finally – aside to these factors and to other factors such as geography (with the South showing more pro-state support) – political ideology predictably plays a key role on state-market attitudes. I will come to this point later; but this chapter offers a good example of how analyses in this book reveal a complex interplay of factors at different levels: contextual (the economy), institutional (presence of specific institutions, generating specific expectations), and individual (ideological predispositions).

Yet the relevance of one more level (the meso level of political actors) emerges from the instructing Chapters 6, 8 and 16, respectively dedicated to libertarianism (and civic attitudes), the environment, and immigration: three issue domains that are becoming of key importance for party competition in Western Europe. On virtually all these issues, trends show an overall stability across time. Roughly two thirds express concern for environmental problems, but at the same time with stably lower willingness to actively give part of the income for improving the environment (pp. 176–178); and attitudes of closure towards migrants show cross-time stability, in fact irrespective of specific economic and migration crises (p. 311; p. 319). On social libertarianism, conservative positions overall stably prevail, putting Italy (still in 2018: p. 145) among the most conservative countries in Europe on these issues, leading the authors to evoke a ‘traditionalist syndrome’ (p. 144). However, there is an exception to this trend: attitudes towards homosexuality. These record a significant increase in openness in the 2018 survey (p. 144; p. 150) compared to 2009 (although such openness halves on items regarding parenting). This distinctive, outstanding trend leads the book editors (p. 29) to an interpretation that – rather than towards the slow and constant value change resulting from social modernization – points towards the role of specific meso actors (social movements, advocacy groups) in successfully acting to redefine social norms concerning attitudes towards differences, and towards homosexuality in particular.

This finding completes documenting the ability of the book to identify the complexity of change (or stability) of values and attitudes that represent driving forces of political change and key objects of contention in contemporary politics. And indeed, if we push ourselves beyond the two rival anchoring frameworks proposed in the book, this material suggests a first potential avenue of research that opens up where the editors stopped: to cast a light on (and to develop appropriate models of) the interplay of different factors and actors at different levels (context, institutions, political actors, individuals) in producing change in attitudes, with a special attention to the increasing role of advocacy groups, in an age where political parties have lost part of their mobilization potential of past decades. This stimulus alone, in my view – along with the book's reliance on EVS/WVS data available for many countries – should urge the authors to seek opportunities for translating the book in English, in order to offer these materials to the international research community, especially given the peculiarity of Italy's ‘traditionalist syndrome’.

But there is a second important element of potential contribution to an international debate: the book's partly critical relationship with social modernization theory. The editors themselves highlight how, while a first season of change (roughly until the early 1990s) appears to fulfil the expectations of social modernization theory, the decades that follow do not show such trends anymore, and indeed suggest the possibility of a partial ‘pendulum swing’ in a reversed direction, also due to a constant tension in Italian society between critical-progressive instances, conservation and indifference. And this is particularly visible in Chapters 7 and 10, documenting respectively the reversal of growth of both post-materialism and (social and) political participation. The editors’ introduction concludes that the most plausible framework emerges from the intersection between social modernization and (broadly meant) institutions-driven perspectives. However, various findings in the book suggest at times a more radical hunch: that the very idea of a continuous ‘silent revolution’, rooted in an ongoing, one-directional process of social modernization, might itself be the product of a specific age. An age dominated by the notion that solutions to problems would be collective; and where – upon successful satisfaction of primary needs – citizens would turn to social and political participation for fulfilling their higher-order aspirations to self-achievement. One wonders whether a new age – perhaps symbolically inaugurated by Ronald Reagan's famous sentence: ‘government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem’ might have introduced new sets of values and incentives to action, so that – beyond fulfilling primary needs – citizens (especially those holding conservative values: see the importance of ideological orientations throughout the book) might not necessarily move towards public-oriented achievement, but perhaps still towards some private, non-political achievement, perhaps (again) in the material, economic arena. The richness, breadth and nuance of the findings in this book are able to inspire this speculation and many other questions about the evolution of values and attitudes in the Western world; and this, in my view, witnesses – even in an international perspective – the important value of Come cambiano gli italiani.