The ‘Perverse Effects' of Political Corruption
| Author | Alberto Vannucci,Donatella della Porta |
| Published date | 01 August 1997 |
| Date | 01 August 1997 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00094 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The `Perverse Eects' of
Political Corruption
DONATELLA DELLA PORTA AND ALBERTO VANNUCCI
Introduction
The worst political crisis in the Italian republic's history began on 17 February
1992 in Milan, economic (and one-time moral) capital of the country. That day
saw the ®rst of what would become a long series of arrests of prominent
politicians and functionaries from all the national political parties, accused of
extremely serious crimes, including extortion, corruption, criminal conspiracy,
association in organized crime and receipt of stolen goods. The investigations of
Antonio di Pietro, the Milanese Assistant Prosecutor who would later become a
national hero, led to the arrest of Mario Chiesa, a local administrator who
belonged to the Socialist Party (PSI) and was president of one of the city's
public institutions (an old people's home). The magistrate's investigations
subsequently mushroomed, laying bare the true nature of public administration
in what would become known as tangentopoli (`Bribesville'). Investigations
spread from Milan to other northern and central Italian cities and, from 1993,
into the south of the country. Initially concentrated on local politics, they
quickly extended to the topmost levels of large private and public enterprises,
and major government ®gures as well as the national secretaries of the various
political parties were implicated. In a matter of months the magistracy had
revealed a scene of corruption and political illegality unprecedented in the
history of western democracies, in which the entire political class of the country,
as well as broad sectors of the business community, were implicated. To give
just a few indicative statistics: on 18 May 1993, only a year after the election of a
new parliament, 205 out of a total of 630 deputies and 81 out of 326 senators
were under investigation, albeit not only for oences against the public
administration.1 By the end of 1994 the number of suspects involved had
already reached more than 7000, including 338 ex-deputies, 100 ex-senators,
331 regional, 122 provincial and 1525 communal administrators, and 1373
public functionaries.2 Magistrates had also issued some 4000 preventive custody
orders.3
Besides underlining what both media and politicians have come to call the
`crisis of the First Republic', these corruption investigations provide a great deal
of material on what can be de®ned ± paraphrasing Bachrach and Baratz4 ± as
Translated by John Donaldson.
1 Sapere di non sapere, I parlamentari inquisiti: i deputati, Roma, Sapere 2000 (1993);
I parlamentari inquisiti: i senatori, Roma, Sapere 2000 (1993).
2 L'UnitaÁ, 7 December 1994, p. 4.
3 Samarcanda, 15 November 1994.
4 P. Bachrach and M. S. Baratz, Power and Poverty. Theory and Practice (New York, Oxford
University Press, 1970).
# Political Studies Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DONATELLA DELLA PORTA AND ALBERTO VANNUCCI
517
the `other face of power'. By reviewing what has emerged from the `mani pulite'
inquiries since 1992, together with what was slowly accumulated in earlier
judicial investigations, it is possible to reconstruct certain facets of that
`invisible' level of Italian politics which has had so heavy an in¯uence on the
`visible' one.5
The article which follows uses evidence from the Italian case to re¯ect upon
the eects of political corruption. The ®rst section presents a typology of the
distortions created in public demand through extensive political corruption,
with particular reference to public contracts. In the second section, examples are
given of how corruption contributes to elevating costs, reducing quality and
delaying the completion of public works. Section 3 demonstrates how the
creation of a `fast lane' for those who pay bribes forces those who do not into
even `slower' and less ecient lanes, whilst section 4 analyses the wider impact
of the transaction costs involved in collecting bribes. The ®fth section examines
some `dynamic' aspects of the progressive loss of eciency on the part of ®rms
working in the public sector, associated with the `inverted' selection process
produced by corruption. In section 6, the impact of spreading corruption on
public perceptions of the eciency and impartiality of public procedures is
considered, and it is demonstrated that the above factors feed a vicious circle of
rising mistrust which operates as both a precondition, and a predictable
outcome, of corruption. In the seventh and ®nal section, attention is focused on
how ineciency and corruption in Italy have interacted with other pathologies
to erode the political system's resources of legitimation. The research is based on
a study of judicial documents relating to 40 episodes of corruption in Italy, the
reports of Parliamentary Inquiry Commissions, demands for the indictment of
members of Parliament, and the daily and weekly press.
Corruption and the Distortion of Public Demand
Any phase of the procedure regulating the purchase or production of goods and
services for the collective well-being can be in¯uenced by corruption: the
decision to purchase this or that, the selection of participants in tendering, the
awarding of the contract, control over the execution of work, the ®nal payment.
The de®nition of public demand is a pivotal moment in the democratic political
process since it is here that the administrative system is confronted with the
needs and demands of social groups. Political mediation is the ®lter through
which interests are articulated and aggregated, and its task, as Pizzorno has
pointed out, is `to identify and interpret the needs and desires of the population;
select and generalize those which can be expressed in political terms; propose,
justify and criticize policies and measures to achieve these ends or, when
necessary, to explain why they cannot be satis®ed'.6 Corruption radically alters
this function, privileging the satisfaction of so-called `internal demand'.7 Cor-
ruption, and complicity between those who are corrupt,8 causes a weakening of
5 A. Pizzorno, Le radici della politica assoluta (Milano, Feltrinelli, 1993).
6 A. Pizzorno, `La corruzione nel sistema politico', introduction to D. della Porta, Lo scambio
occulto (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1992), p. 22.
7 G. Chevallier and D. Loshak, Introduzione alla scienza dell'amministrazione (Rimini, Maggioli,
1982), p. 113.
8 J. Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989),
pp. 157±8.
# Political Studies Association, 1997
518
The `Perverse Eects' of Political Corruption
the institutional restraints designed to protect the general interest in the
formulation of public demand, and the latter is decided essentially by the
interests of those participating in the transactions which share out the pro®ts
made from corruption in public intervention.
The overall picture which emerges is of a fragmentation of public demand in
order to satisfy particular interests while, at the same time, no wider vision of
the problems develops among the various public ocials involved. As the State
Audit Court pointed out: `After long, involved preliminary planning and a
dicult passage through Parliament, wide-ranging measures designed to launch
the process of rationalization and coordination of the country's major
infrastructures were approved. These have failed to materialize, either remaining
largely unimplemented . . . , suering unexpected interruptions . . . or being
seriously delayed' (CC, vol. II, I, 1990, 494).9
When political corruption is systemic, the discretional management of public
spending often becomes an objective in itself. The aim of administrators is to
attract as large a quantity of resources as possible to the areas where they have
power in order to pocket a fee for mediation in the form of a bribe and/or gain
support as a result of the eects of public investment on employment (treated as
an area of clientelistic exchange). Public spending is therefore diverted to those
sectors where gains from corruption are greatest and where the discretional
nature of the procedures reduces the risks involved. In general, little attention
is paid to whether the needs of the collectivity are served by these works or
services. It is not even necessary that they are completed or brought into use, as
demonstrated by the countless projects never ®nished or never actually used. As
in the case of the `Teardo Clan' of Savona, the actions of corrupt administrators
can `radically and seriously distort administrative activity, works being con-
tracted exclusively to exact bribes more safely and easily and not on the basis of
any actual technical requirement' (TRIS, 155).10 For instance, annual per capita
consumption of cement in Italy was 800 kg, double that of the United States
and triple that of Germany and Britain, at a cost of 33 thousand billion lire.
According to one expert, `at bottom, at least 80 per cent of these works are
unnecessary; some of them are undoubtedly a disaster'.11 But, construction is a
sector in which bribes proliferate with ease.
Predictably, one of the consequences of the priority given to obtaining
funding is scarce regard for the quality of the projects which are at the basis
of public demand. Antonio Persico, an engineer and secretary of the CRTA,
technical organ of the Puglia Region,...
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