Political corruption has traditionally been presented as a
phenomenon characteristic of developing countries, authoritarian
regimes, or societies in which the value system favored tacit
patrimony and clientelism. Recently, however, the thesis of an
inverse correlation between corruption and economic and political
development (and therefore democratic "maturity") has been
frequently and convincingly challenged. Countries with a long
democratic tradition, such as the United States, Belgium, Britain,
and Italy, have all experienced a combination of headline-grabbing
scandals and smaller-scale cases of misappropriation.
In "Corrupt Exchanges," primary research on Italian cases
(judicial proceedings, in-depth interviews, parliamentary
documents, and press databases), combined with a cross-national
comparison based on a secondary analysis of corruption in
democratic systems, is used to develop a model to analyze
corruption as a network of illegal exchanges. The authors explore
in great detail the structure of that network, by examining both
the characteristics of the actors who directly engage in the
corruption and the resources they exchange. These processes of
degeneration have caused a crisis in the dominant paradigm in both
academic and political considerations of corruption.
The book is organized around the analysis of the resources that
are exchanged and of the different actors who take part.
Politicians in business, illegal brokers, Mafia members, protected
entrepreneurs, and party-appointed bureaucrats exchange resources
on the illegal market, altering the institutional system of
interactions between the state and the market. In this complex web
of exchanges, bonds of trust are established that allow the corrupt
exchange to thrive. The book will serve both as a theoretical
approach to a political problem of large bearing on democratic
institutions and a descriptive warning of a system in peril.
General
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