CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

Elite Cartels 93
lower than for the three cases considered in chapter 4. Too much should
not be made of these measures by themselves, but in these societies elites
face considerable political and economic competition within a weaker
framework of institutions.
Italy: politics visible and invisible
Images of Italy and its politics have long been at odds with underlying
realities. Its First Republic, lasting from the end of World War Two until
the early 1990s, had over fifty governments, some of them short-lived,
and yet there was considerable underlying stability. A broad, if sometimes
shifting, coalition of parties led by the Christian Democrats (DC) held
power throughout that era, with electoral results and a roster of top
political figures that was remarkably consistent over time. A ‘‘weak but
heavy’’ state 2 intervened extensively but incoherently in the economy
(Colazingari and Rose-Ackerman, 1998: 448–449). Public administration
was of very low quality (Golden, 2003); laws often had little moral or
practical force, tax evasion was the rule rather than the exception, and
successive governments ran up massive debts. Still, Italy rose from military
defeat and traditional poverty to global economic importance by the
1980s. In the Italian partitocrazia or ‘‘partitocracy’’ (Calise, 1994;
Bufacchi and Burgess, 1998: 4–5) national parties dominated governments,
policy, business, communications media, and much of civil
society to a remarkable extent. But those parties were ineffective at such
basic functions as selecting personnel for political roles, integrating citizens
and their views into politics, and forming public policies (Della Porta
and Vannucci, 1999, 2002). As the 1970s and 1980s wore on they
became weaker as organizations too.
Corruption too was a matter of appearance versus reality. That it was
extensive was never in doubt; still, the revelations of the early 1990s, in
the course of the tangentopoli (‘‘bribe city’’) scandal and mani pulite
(‘‘clean hands’’) investigations, were on a scale few had anticipated. By
the time the scandals broke, partitocrazia and the parties themselves had
been ‘‘hollowed out’’ by corruption and organizational decline; revelations
of bribery and kickbacks would discredit major business firms and
executives too. In 1994 virtually the entire political class and party system
of the First Republic were swept away by voters. But the particular kind of
corruption that had been practiced had given the First Republic much of
2 Thanks to Paul Heywood for suggesting that term.