Corruzione grand nei sistemi politici: un’analisi panel nelle regioni italiane

Grand corruption in political systems: a panel analysis in Italian regions. How corruption is affected by the main characteristic of political systems, such as party system and electoral formula? Actually, scientific literature has not yet reached an agreement on this relationship. Indeed, different works show different results, and there is no consensus on the effect of party system (i.e. political competition) and electoral formula (i.e. degree of disproportionality) on corruption. That the political system provides incentives, one way or the other, for corruption and rent-seeking activities, it is a major issue, since the latter happen within a political framework. The heterogeneity of results among the studies focusing on the effect of party system and electoral formula on corruption, may be due to an un-optimal operalization of the corruption variable. Indeed, while talking about corruption, we refer to several different phenomena. In fact, there is a corruption that affects high decisional levels of government and involves big bribes to have rents from the public apparatus (in the form of infrastructure contracts, or favorable legislation, or other high value benefit). At the same time, there is another form of corruption that involves daily and less rent-productive activities, such as bribing low level bureaucrats to obtain a document faster, or to close an eye on small infractions. These two forms of corruption are recognized as grand and petty corruption respectively. Exploiting the highly detailed and differentiated articles of the Italian penal code addressing these felonies, we discriminate among grand and petty corruption with an innovative proxy (based upon well-known frameworks and methodologies). Our objective is to isolate the effects of the characteristics of the regional political system in Italy on grand corruption compared to petty corruption. How party systems and electoral formulas affect rent-seeking activities at different government levels? As expected by the theoretical framework the empirics on the Italian case in the period from 2000 to 2015 show how the regional political competition and disproportionality of electoral formula (i.e. a more disproportional electoral rule) have a negative effect on grand corruption, and none on petty corruption. The results enforce a branch of the literature, helps to disentangle mixed results in previous works, and are compatible with the idea that the shorter the horizon of a politician in power is (due to lack of political stagnation) the stronger the incentive to be corrupted is (to extract rents before it is too late to do it. Our paper contributes to improve the knowledge of the strand of literature on political system and corruption in different way. First, it addresses this issue adopting a new perspective through the analysis of the isolated effects of political systems on grand corruption that is more suitable for the political environment. Second, we employ in the econometric analysis political data referring to regional elections rather regional data referring to national elections as in a previous similar study conducted in Italy. This aspect allows us to link corruption-related crimes committed at regional level with political system variables referring to the same region: a private corruptor is more likely to engage in rent-seeking activities with a corrupt politician belonging to the government of his/her region rather than with a member of the national parliament. These two original aspects of the work may allow solving a debated finding in the literature about the sign and the magnitude of the direct and indirect effects of the two main variable of a political system, such as political competitiveness and electoral formula.