Corruption and anti-corruption: The political defeat of ‘Clean Hands’ in Italy

Mafia and organised crime in Italy: The unacknowledged successes of law enforcement

“…All of the units of the two mafia confederations place their hopes for economic recovery in gaining public contracts, which began to be distributed from 2000, after the sharp drop, especially in the South, following the Tangentopoli ('Bribesville') inquiries (see Della Porta and Vannucci 2007). Cosa Nostra and 'Ndrangheta families have been particularly eager to intercept part of the considerable sums from the EU funds of Agenda 2000: approximately e9,000 and e5,000 million, respectively, were invested between 2000 and 2006 in Sicily and Calabria.…”

“…Except for this provision, however, the general judicial legislation of Berlusconi's government was far from being supportive of prosecutors and judges' work. Besides a series of ad personam bills to solve the judicial problems of the Prime Minister and his closest associates (see Hibberd 2007;Della Porta and Vannucci 2007), the reform of the judicial order proposed by the Justice Minister Roberto Castelli provoked the uproar of the entire Italian magistracy, which went on strike, en masse, four times.…”

Corruption, Party Leaders, and Candidate Selection: Evidence from Italy

“…Scholars of the country lament that the Clean Hands investigations failed to curb corruption (della Porta and Vannucci ) and may have even worsened it (Vannucci ). As evidence, analysts contend that “the political class has only partially ‘renewed’ itself, with a large number of politicians being ‘recycled’ from the parties of the ‘First Republic”’ (della Porta and Vannucci , 830) and that “all the indicators available on the diffusion of corruption instead signal high and constant levels” (831). This view has been widely diffused by the Italian press and is arguably conventional wisdom (Di Nicola ).…”

Anti-corruption: the indirect ‘big bang’ approach

“…However, in states that, on the contrary, suffer from systematically corrupt structures, it is likely that the causal mechanism works in the opposite direction, meaning that it is the corruption of precisely these types of institutions that are holding back development towards democratic governance (Diamond, 2008 just as a predominantly non-corrupt system will self-correct to deal with corrupt individuals and the legislative or political flaws that facilitated their corruption, so will a predominantly corrupt system self-correct to maintain its corruption following a purge. (Robert, 2003: 63) An example of this process is the recent development in Italian politics where despite strong efforts in the early 1990s to eradicate political corruption, the current situation is described in some areas as worse than before the 'clean hands' operation (della Porta and Vannucci, 2007). As Claus Offe has argued, questions remain on what brings countries into a vicious circle with corrupt institutions and also, in a corrupt context: 'which motives, values, and political forces would actually push forward the reform project .…”