Politics by Denunciation

• In Event: Corruption

Abstract

Judicial investigations of politicians are a fundamental component of politics, often leading to scandals. Yet, empirical evidence of the strategic determinants of judicial investigations is intrinsically hard to gather, a problem that has significantly limited the study of this important phenomenon. This paper studies political scandals through their denunciation, using original data on 1125 episodes of misbehavior involving Italian MPs (1983-2019). This new dataset allows us to investigate the political nature of denunciations, comparing various types of scandals spanning from corruption to crimes of opinion. Results provide evidence in favor of a political use of denunciations for corruption crimes: when a party weakens, the likelihood that political enemies denounce past misbehavior of members of the weakened party increases, suggesting that the political use of denunciation is elastic to changes in the electoral performance. The timing of past misbehavior is crucial: members of weakened parties are more likely to be accused of misbehavior that happened a long time before the accusation, which further supports the conjecture that accusations are political.

Authors

• Andrea Ceron, Università degli Studi di Milano

• Giovanna Invernizzi, Collegio Carlo Alberto