Less conflict, more happiness – the weak cleavages in the Italian agro-rural world

The Italian rural world is interpreted in many contradictory ways. The irenic and bucolic images live side-by-side with conflictual and populist visions. The locution ‘rural world’ of a whole and coherent picture of the countryside, recalls antagonist interpretations, respectively the integrated community and the class conflicts. Thus, an inclusive representation requires a clarification of both the framework used to understand the rural world and the scopes of the analysis. The framework will be represented by the cleavages spanning Italian rural areas and the scope by the question of whether such a world is happier than other residential areas, typically the towns. Both explain the paper’s title: cleavages exist in rural areas but they are weaker than those of other places. Thus, weaker contrapositions means probably a happier life for farmers and countryside residents. But, ‘less conflict more happiness’ is followed by a question mark underlining several doubts and the need for further research. Happiness is a legitimate and preferable object of research to overcome the prevailing economic or structural analysis of the rural world. Of course, it is a particularly elusive topic (Paba, 2012), but the difficulties of monitoring it cannot be an excuse for insisting only on objective factors, like agricultural settings, infrastructures and demographics. The paper will develop in four steps: (1) a critical reconstruction of the main labels used to represent the rural world; (2) the description of a model, the Rokkan cleavages, that can overcome the dualism included in those labels; (3) an actualisation of Rokkan’s divisions to the Italian context (including some examples); (4) a conclusion of the question about happiness in the rural world.