Italy: corruption in public administration and the “bureaucracy of corruption”

The Italian public administration, with its specific characteristics, provided an institutional architecture of roles and functions that has contributed to the diffusion of systemic corruption. After the judicial and political earthquake of the 1990s, certain sectors and actors within the public administration still seem to provide fertile soil for corrupt exchanges, but through the activation of different mechanisms. In what follows, after some theoretical consideration on the specificity of corruption in the public administration (section 2), an analysis will be presented on the specific role of Italian public servants in the systemic corruption that emerged with “clean hands” (section 3), focusing then on the new equilibria of power and dynamics of corruption in the Italian public administration (section 4). Some final considerations will then be presented (section 5). Judicial acts and journalistic material will be used as empirical sources to illustrate the arguments and cases presented.