Mafia and Political Competition Redirecting Votes not Discouraging Candidates

The efforts of organized crime to affect the outcome of elections have been well documented. In the present paper, we exploit the staggered enforcement of Law 164/1991, an anticrime measure that mandates dissolution of the city council in the case of suspected mafia infiltration, to show that political competition in municipal elections in Italy, measured by the win margin between the two “strongest” candidates and the Herfindahl index, increases sharply in the first election following a compulsory administration in dissolved municipalities compared to the control group of municipalities that have never been subject to council dissolution. We find that this effect of the anti-mafia policy remains slightly significant up to the third election after dissolution, after which time it disappears. The paper suggests that mafias manipulate electoral outcomes principally by affecting voter behaviour, rather than by discouraging unfriendly candidates. We investigate several channels that might be driving these results.