Abstract
Different indicators show that Italy is an outlier in terms of corruption. As developed a country as Italy should have a much lower level of corruption. All the factors scholars have found to be affecting corruption fail to explain this puzzle. I start instead from the assumption that corrupt exchanges thrive when parties can trust each other both to comply with their obligations and not to snitch. Could Italians enjoy a greater ability to cooperate successfully in illegal markets, and could this ability to make their illegal pacts stick explain their anomalous propensity at striking corrupt deals? One could think of mafia enforcement, which certainly helps. Yet, corruption occurs also outside the regions with heavy mafia presence—it seems rather a white-collar affair in which threats are unnecessary and no blood is spilt. I consider a special bonding mechanism, the sharing of compromising information (SCI), and—relying on evidence from case studies and an experiment—I illustrate how SCI works in bringing about cooperation in other illegal markets. But why should Italians be in a better position to rely on SCI to pursue their corrupt deals? The answer, I contend, lies in the peculiarity of Italy’s judicial system, which is at once inefficient yet independent, and jointly these features make it exploitable by villains as a cheap, reliable and unwitting enforcing mechanism for their deals.
Corruptissima republica, plurimae leges
Tacitus, Annals, III, 27
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Notes
- 1.
Daniel Treisman points out that: “Italy’s corruption rating fell sharply—by more than one and a half points on the Transparency International Index—between the early and mid-1990s, possibly because of the public outrage and judicial campaign against political corruption. But, for its level of economic development, democracy and openness to trade, Italy before these changes had an abnormally high corruption rating” (2000: 441–442, my italics). In that short period of time the judiciary came down the hardest on political corruption in an operation known as “Mani Pulite”, causing a positive blip in the index; but since then matters have gone back to … abnormal.
- 2.
For a comprehensive account see Vannucci 2012, esp. Chap. 3.
- 3.
A new index, based on corruption cases prosecuted in one country but which occurred in a different country, proposed by Saarni Escresa and Lucio Picci, gives some evidence that the CPI may make Italian corruption seem worse than it is (2017).
- 4.
An interesting bias in corruption beliefs is revealed by Olken (2009: 951): “Villagers in more ethnically heterogeneous villages are less likely to report trusting their fellow villagers, and more likely to attend project monitoring meetings, than those in homogeneous villages, which may explain why there is greater perceived corruption in heterogeneous villages but lower missing expenditures.”
- 5.
A different bias is mentioned by Treisman: “It is possible that the ratings we have been analysing measure not corruption itself but guesses about its extent in particular countries that experts or survey respondents have derived by applying conventional theories about corruption’s causes, the same conventional theories that inform the hypotheses of researchers, which turn out—surprise!—to fit the data well. Believing democracy reduces corruption, the experts give high grades to democracies; researchers then discover that democracy predicts a low corruption rating” (2007: 32). Paradoxically, if this were the reason why we cannot rely on these indexes, then the Italian case should be reassuring for these variables that explain corruption levels elsewhere, do not explain the Italian case well.
- 6.
The results also confirm Chile as a positive anomaly, but not Uruguay, which is on the expected line.
- 7.
See, for example, http://espresso.repubblica.it/inchieste/2014/06/09/news/confessate-a-milano-tangenti-per-tre-milioni-1.168631; http://corrieredelveneto.corriere.it/veneto/notizie/cronaca/2016/13-aprile-2016/tangenti-mose-via-processo-gli-imputati-matteoli-orsoni-240299413428.shtml; www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2015/12/21/mose-a-giudizio-il-sistema-delle-tangenti-processo-per-lex-ministro-fi-matteoli-e-lex-sindaco-orsoni/2324332/.
- 8.
χ2(1) = 29.07, p < 0.001.
- 9.
39% vs 63%: χ2(1) = 18.75, p < 0.001; 39% vs 23%: χ2(1) = 8.52, p = 0.004.
- 10.
χ2(1) = 4.58, p = 0.032.
- 11.
χ2(1) = 4.13, p = 0.042.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
The value of concentrating on preventing small acts of deviancy rests on different and deeper reasons, illustrated by evidence coming from neuroscience: “Behaviorally, we show that the extent to which participants engage in self-serving dishonesty increases with repetition. Using functional MRI, we show that signal reduction in the amygdala is sensitive to the history of dishonest behavior, consistent with adaptation. Critically, the extent of reduced amygdala sensitivity to dishonesty on a present decision relative to the previous one predicts the magnitude of escalation of self-serving dishonesty on the next decision. The findings uncover a biological mechanism that supports a ‘slippery slope’: what begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions” (Garrett et al. 2016: 1727).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Valeria Pizzini Gambetta and Alberto Vannucci—as well as Avinash Dixit, Juan Dubra, Frank Fukuyama, Francesca Recanatini and the other participants in the IEA Roundtable—for their comments and suggestions.
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Gambetta, D. (2018). Why is Italy Disproportionally Corrupt?: A Conjecture. In: Basu, K., Cordella, T. (eds) Institutions, Governance and the Control of Corruption. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65684-7_6
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