Political Patronage, Bureaucracy and Corruption in Postwar Italy1

This paper examines the relationship between the legislature and the public administration in postwar Italy (understood as the period from about 1948 through 1994). Italian public administration is normally characterized as poorly designed and ine±cient. A principal-agent framework would lead one to believe that political control of the bureaucracy was inadequate in Italy, and that extensive bureaucratic slippage must have existed. Drawing on an alternative model originally elaborated to study bureaucratic ine±ciency in the United States, I argue instead that Italian legislators exercised adequate control over the bureaucracy, and that the characteristics of the system to elicit such severe public disapprobation were e®ects of practices | especially the extensive use of political patronage | that had been deliberately designed to enhance the reelection opportunities of parliamentary incumbents. I interpret political patronage as the individuization of bene ̄ts that are usually allocated collectively. I also discuss why bureaucratic inef̄ciency led to widespread political corruption in Italy, whereas it did not in the US. Finally, I speculate on how entrenched systems of political patronage and corruption can be overturned. \For a country as prosperous as Italy," reports a standard textbook on contemporary Italian politics, \the resulting quality of public services | education, health, social security, justice, transport | is exceptionally low" (Hine 1993, p. 255). Not surprisingly, public dissatisfaction with the national bureaucracy has traditionally run high in Italy, much higher than in other western European countries. Why has postwar Italian public administration performed so badly? The dominant contemporary approach to understanding public administration is grounded in a principal-agent framework. This view contends that legislators seek to achieve policy goals, but that bureaucrats, given their greater access to specialized policy information, may not faithfully execute the goals of their principals. The perspective extends and builds on Max Weber's original insight that the specialized expertise of bureaucrats pits them against the democratic ethos of the elected politician. According to this view, if the behavior of those who work in the public administration fails to conform to the interests of their ultimate principal | the electorate | it must be because legislators have been hoodwinked by their bureaucratic agents. Bureaucratic slippage is endemic, but the job of the elected o±cial is that of tinkering with the design of institutions so as to limit this slippage. While it may never be possible to eradicate it entirely, and the interests of bureaucrats and politicians may therefore require constant realignment, in a modern democratic setting persistent, massive bureaucratic indi®erence to the expressed desires of a majority of the electorate is largely inexplicable using a principal-agent framework. Instead, the strengths of this approach lie with its attention to the subtle ways in which legislators use \structure and process" (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987; McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1989) to shape bureaucratic behavior and outputs, even without directly intervening in or overseeing the daily operations of agencies. This formulation contends that even ostensibly \independent" bureaucratic structures in fact largely execute the policy intentions of their principals. A particularly telling example is o®ered by Japan, whose bureaucracy is usually seen as highly autonomous of political interference. A principalagent approach has been e®ectively used (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1993) to counter the standard interpretation of the Japanese bureaucracy as independent of elected o±cials in the formulation of public policy. Such an approach has little to say about chronically \bad" bureaucracy;