The Quiet Payoff: Mafia Electoral Support and Policy Inaction

Alessio Carrozzo Magli, Giovanni Righetto and Antonio Schiavone

No 12330, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Organised crime groups often deliver electoral support to politicians, yet how they are rewarded remains unclear. Using data from Sicilian municipalities (1992–2022), we show that narrowly won races by Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi’s party, coincide with sharp declines in the reallocation of confiscated mafia assets—but only in mafia-controlled areas. Exploiting historical variation in the mafia’s vote-buying capacity, we find that municipalities with stronger historical ties experience larger post-election declines, exclusively under Berlusconi’s governments. Instrumenting modern support with this proxy further reinforces the plausibly causal evidence that national authorities reward organised crime through policy inaction.

Keywords: organised crime; mafia; vote buying; corruption; misallocation of confiscated assets; political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H11 K42 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12330.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12330

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().