Corrupt Exchanges: Actors, Resources, and Mechanisms of Political Corruption

Poltical corruption has traditionally been presented as phenomenon characteristic of developing countries, authoritarian regime, or societies in which the value system favoured tacit patrimony and clientism. Recently, however, the thesis of an inverse correlation between corruption and economic and political development has been frequently and convincingly challenged. Countries with a long democratic tradition, such as the USA, France, Belgium and Italy, have all experienced a combination of headline-grabbing scandals and smaller-scale cases of misappropriation. Corruption increasingly appears a problem common to most, if not all democracies. In this text, primary research on the more conspicuous Italian case, 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.

Table of Contents:
The market for corrupt exchange - an introduction; the resources of corruption; the business of politicians; political parties and corruption; political corruption, bureaucratic corruption and the judiciary; brokers and occult power; the market for corruption and economic system; poltics, mafia and the corruption market; the dynamics of political corruption - a conclusion.

About the Author :
Donatella della Porta Alberto Vannucci, University of Pisa, Italy

Review :
-In this substantial volume, translated from the original Italian for the benefit of international researchers, political scientists della Porta of the University of Florence and Vannucci of the University of Pisa provide a scholarly survey of the problem of political corruption under modern conditions... della Porta and Vannucci show with new and theoretically greater sophistication how, in late-20th-century Italy, a system of self-reinforcing values and behavior opposed to the state and the public interest may emerge from inefficiencies engendered by the social and economic transformation of political parties and the political classes that they serve... Graduate students, researchers, and faculty.- --T. Fackler, Choice "In this substantial volume, translated from the original Italian for the benefit of international researchers, political scientists della Porta of the University of Florence and Vannucci of the University of Pisa provide a scholarly survey of the problem of political corruption under modern conditions... della Porta and Vannucci show with new and theoretically greater sophistication how, in late-20th-century Italy, a system of self-reinforcing values and behavior opposed to the state and the public interest may emerge from inefficiencies engendered by the social and economic transformation of political parties and the political classes that they serve... Graduate students, researchers, and faculty." --T. Fackler, Choice "In this substantial volume, translated from the original Italian for the benefit of international researchers, political scientists della Porta of the University of Florence and Vannucci of the University of Pisa provide a scholarly survey of the problem of political corruption under modern conditions... della Porta and Vannucci show with new and theoretically greater sophistication how, in late-20th-century Italy, a system of self-reinforcing values and behavior opposed to the state and the public interest may emerge from inefficiencies engendered by the social and economic transformation of political parties and the political classes that they serve... Graduate students, researchers, and faculty." --T. Fackler, Choice