With a little help from my friends.: Political competition in the shadow of organized crime

Pasquale Accardo; Giuseppe De Feo; Giacomo De Luca

doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104998

With a little help from my friends. Political competition in the shadow of organized crime

Pasquale Accardo, Giuseppe De Feo, Giacomo De Luca

Department of Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Higher electoral competition may reinforce the position of politically active criminal organizations, which can endorse politicians in exchange for favors. This paper formalizes this intuition and test it on Italian electoral data, using the 1991 electoral reform as an exogenous source of variation in electoral competition in one of the two branches of the Parliament. Our triple-difference estimates suggest that after the reform mafia-prone areas reported higher vote shares awarded to the party traditionally supported by criminal organizations only for the branch affected by the reform, and a larger dispersion of votes across candidates of the same party.

Original language	English
Article number	104998
Number of pages	16
Journal	Journal of Public Economics
Volume	227
Early online date	29 Sept 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104998
Publication status	Published - 30 Nov 2023

Funding

We thank Fabrizio Adriani, Sutirtha Bagchi, Alex Dickson, Ruben Durante, Rok Spurk, Piercarlo Zanchettin, the editor and three anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. Giuseppe De Feo gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by the British Academy , MD20-200068 fellowship.

Keywords

Organized crime
Political competition

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Finance
Economics and Econometrics

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104998

Cite this

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