Organized Crime, Violence, and Politics

NBER Working Paper No. 22093

Issued in March 2016

NBER Program(s):Political Economy



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.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w22093

Published: Alberto Alesina & Salvatore Piccolo & Paolo Pinotti, 2019. "Organized Crime, Violence, and Politics," The Review of Economic Studies, vol 86(2), pages 457-499. citation courtesy of

Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these: