CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

94 Syndromes of Corruption
its de facto structure, contributing to its stability and accomplishments as
well as to chronic weaknesses and ultimate collapse.
Italy as an Elite Cartels case
Elite Cartel corruption can bridge public and private sectors, political and
economic power, and political parties. Such was the case in the partitocrazia
of Italy’s First Republic. A weak executive (Colazingari and Rose-
Ackerman, 1998: 460) wrangled with a parliament whose powerful,
party-dominated committees wrote legislation that was complex, vague,
oriented toward local or sectoral interests, and frequently allowed wide
discretion. Implementation was the task of a large, ineffective bureaucracy
which, through patronage and de facto lines of influence, was
‘‘colonized’’ by the major parties (Waters, 1994: 175; Bufacchi and
Burgess, 1998: ch. 4). The state’s credibility suffered not only because
of the gap between formal institutions and political reality, but also
because of history and culture. For many Italians Catholicism or
Marxism provided a more compelling framework of allegiances and
values than the Constitution or the civil state (Waters, 1994: 176). In
the south, organized crime was often the strongest organizing force of all.
Party spoils systems extended into civil society (Golden, 2003); voluntarism,
and social and political trust, were weak (particularly in the south),
with traditional clientelism taking the place of more civic ties and modes
of action. Indeed, Pizzorno (1993, quoted in Hine, 1995) has argued that
the parties played a major role in ‘‘socializing’’ both elites and their clients
into patterns of illegality. In the economy, many enterprises wore invisible
‘‘party labels’’ (Della Porta and Vannucci, 1999: 191–192, 2002: 722)
and obtained credit, contracts, and favorable bureaucratic decisions on
political grounds (Waters, 1994: 176). Boards of directors at times
resembled caucuses of the various parties’ representatives. Business and
politics were increasingly fused – a good working definition of Elite Cartel
corruption.
Golden (2003) argues that the parties deliberately created a system of
poor governance in order to maximize the value of their bureaucratic
interventions. That state of affairs might seem to be just another
Influence Market case, but there are important differences. One was the
weakness of the bureaucracy, as noted; another was that political interventions
into that bureaucracy were systematic, continuous, and pervasive,
as the notion of colonization implies, rather than discrete deals.
Most important, the parties themselves engaged in extensive collusion.
Electoral politics, on the surface, was strongly ideological and competitive,
but in reality political risks were managed for half a century by a