Welfare or politics? The identity of Italian mutual aid societies as revealed by a latent class cluster analysis of their annual reports

This article proposes a statistical analysis of the Italian mutual aid societies’ annual report data from 1862, 1873 and 1904, and tests the hypothesis, supported by the mainstream literature, that mutual financial support for the poor is just a facade for organizing the political activity of the working classes. Factor analysis allows the data, signaling these two commitments, to be kept separate. Their time evolution, as outlined by an inter-temporal comparison of a latent class cluster analysis, reveals that political commitment, even if generally prevalent, oscillates as a function of environmental conditions, whereas the mutual financial support retains a solid foundation, regardless. The study demonstrates the potential of unconventional annual report data analysis to reveal the deepest nature of the organizations and contributes to exploring the links between political activism and accounting data in not-for-profit organizations.