Mob Violence and the Polls: How Organized Crime Makes a Strategic Use of Pre Electoral Violence

Strategic use of pre-electoral violence by organized crime strongly affects electoral results and the behavior of elected politicians along the lines wished by the criminals, according to an analysis of the Italian vote since 1882, generalizable to all organized crime-ridden countries.

Paolo Pinotti (Bocconi University, Milan) and colleagues from Harvard University and University of Bergamo find that the presence of organized crime is associated with abnormal spikes in violence against politicians in the year before elections, which effectively signal to both voters and politicians the power of criminal organizations. In Mafia-ridden Sicily, political murders (those targeting politicians, campaign workers, committee members, party activists and labor union members) more than double, from 0.7 to 1.7 on average, in electoral years. In turn, an additional political homicide translates into a 2.4 percentage point decrease in the vote for parties that oppose Mafia in the municipality where the murder takes place, having further electoral effects - diminishing with distance - on the rest of the island.

Furthermore, an additional political murder brings a strong decrease in the salience of Mafia in Sicilian MPs speeches in parliamentary debates in the year following the election, the authors find by analyzing 300,000 pages of transcripts.

«Political homicides shift votes away from parties opposed by the organized crime», Prof. Pinotti says, «while honest politicians who are eventually elected in Parliament are discouraged from taking action against the mob».

Organized crime's use of political violence is not only active, but also rational, along the lines of the strategic electoral spending theory. First of all, criminal organizations resort to violence only when there is a chance to affect electoral results: during the Fascist period (1921-1945), with one-party, mock elections, they restrained from it. Second, violence allocation varies according to the electoral system. In proportional systems (1946-1993 in Italy) electoral violence intensifies when the gap between government and opposition parties gets narrower: in years with equal chances of winning for two coalitions, Italy recorded 4.3 more political homicides than average. With majoritarian rule (1994-2004 in Italy), violence concentrates in swing electoral districts.

«Our results don't seem to be specific to Italy», Prof. Pinotti concludes. «Preliminary analysis shows that the probability of deadly terrorist attacks against politicians increases during electoral periods in democracies with stronger criminal organizations».

Alberto Alesina, Salvatore Piccolo, Paolo Pinotti, Organized Crime, Violence, and Politics, forthcoming in The Review of Economic Studies.