Organized Crime, Violence, and Politics / Alberto Alesina, Salvatore Piccolo, Paolo Pinotti.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alesina, Alberto.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Piccolo, Salvatore.

Pinotti, Paolo.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w22093.

NBER working paper series no. w22093

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2016.

Summary:

We investigate how criminal organizations strategically use violence to influence elections in order to get captured politicians elected. The model offers novel testable implications about the use of pre-electoral violence under different types of electoral systems and different degrees of electoral competition. We test these implications by exploiting data on homicide rates in Italy since 1887, comparing the extent of 'electoral-violence cycles' between areas with a higher and lower presence of organized crime, under democratic and non-democratic regimes, proportional and majoritarian elections, and between contested and non-contested districts. We provide additional evidence on the influence of organized crime on politics using parliamentary speeches of politicians elected in Sicily during the period 1945-2013.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2016.