NICEP 2025-08: The quiet payoff: Mafia electoral support and policy inaction

Abstract

Organized crime groups are known to provide electoral support to politicians, but the rewards they obtain in return remain poorly understood. We develop a theoretical framework suggesting that modern mafia support hinges on parties’ willingness to weaken anti-mafia policies, specifically by neglecting the reallocation of confiscated mafia assets. Judicial records indicate that when these assets remain unassigned, crime families can quietly repossess them, turning policy inertia into a hidden payoff. Using data from Sicilian municipalities between 1992 and 2022, we first detect vote manipulation in tightly contested majoritarian races—particularly in smaller towns—indicating strategic vote buying by the mafia. A regression discontinuity design, restricted to comparable municipalities quasi-randomly sorted around the threshold, reveals that narrowly won Forza Italia victories trigger a sharp fall in asset reallocations only within mafia controlled areas. To capture intensive-margin variation in the vote-buying deal, we exploit the mafia’s abrupt 1987 withdrawal of support from the Christian Democrats. Municipalities suffering larger DC vote losses—our proxy for historical mafia vote-buying capacity-experience steeper post-election cuts in asset reallocations, but only during Berlusconi’s governments.

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Authors

Alessio Carrozzo Magli, Giovanni Righetto and Antonio Schiavone

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