CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

102 Syndromes of Corruption
Second Republic is dominated by media magnates and new-model
candidates contending beneath different party banners. Business payments
to parties declined significantly in the wake of the scandals and
the costs of some public contracts dropped by half (Buffachi and Burgess,
1998: 97). European Union policies and global economic change
(Guzzini, 1995) likely have contributed to the decline in state contracting
that Golden (2002) argues left many middle-level and small-business
operators unable to pay up, and thus willing to talk with the mani pulite
judges. But administrative corruption persists (Golden and Chang, 2001:
622). The new electoral and party system produced results that were
novel but not necessarily more decisive in terms of encouraging or
rewarding good government: the first government of media baron Silvio
Berlusconi, who became Prime Minister in 1994 at the head of his Forza
Italia party and a center–right coalition, dissolved amidst corruption
allegations before the year was out. By 2001 Berlusconi was back as
Prime Minister at the head of a new coalition; in late 2004 he was
acquitted in a Milan court of a bribery charge dating from the 1980s,
and another charge was dismissed (New York Times, December 10,
2004), but this is scarcely a new era of genuinely clean hands. Reforms
could not change the underlying culture of clientelism or, by themselves,
strengthen the state or civil society (on the latter point, see Della Porta,
2000). Some measures, such as a tax check-off intended to fund individual
candidates’ campaigns, failed outright, and subsequent measures
moved back toward older practices of routing funds through the parties
(Pujas and Rhodes, 2002: 747).
Reforms may have changed formal institutions and public aspects of
politics and business, but Elite Cartels never depended upon those visible
parts of the system alone. Deeper dynamics of Elite Cartel corruption –
only moderately strong institutions and significant competition in politics
and the economy – remain in place. Those factors are not just analytical
abstractions: corruption in Italy has long been a systematic response to
political opportunities (Kitschelt, 1986; Pujas and Rhodes, 2002)andto
specific weaknesses in the state (Hine, 1995: 199). Lottizzazione and
partitizzazione are ways of managing political risk. Such incentives may
become all the more compelling to the extent that economic liberalization
and the evolving role of the state limit the range of policy alternatives
open to parties, making it harder to rebuild real social constituencies.
A political culture in which the law and state have a normatively ambiguous
status, boundaries between public and private (and thus, between what
can and cannot be bought and sold) are indistinct, and in which private
loyalties and secret societies play major roles, did not vanish with the
elections of 1994 (Hine, 1995: 194–200).