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.