Description
Book SynopsisPolitical 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
Table of ContentsThe 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.
