POWRE: Political Corruption in Postwar Italy

该项目的目的是汇编和分析一个涵盖意大利32个选区的年度数据库，审查1948至1994年期间政治腐败的可能相关因素。政治腐败是治安法官向议会提出的请求，要求取消众议院一名成员的议会豁免权，以便就渎职指控进行法律起诉。收集的数据将包括选区的社会、人口、经济和政治特征，以研究或多或少容易发生腐败的地区的特征。意大利是一个特别值得调查的案例，因为该国的政治腐败程度是战后所有富裕民主国家中最高的。那里持续和极端的政治腐败产生了独特的数据，并有可能进行系统的因果分析。对战后意大利的政治腐败进行横断面(国家以下)时间序列分析，可以确定民主环境下政治腐败的决定因素主要是经济(例如，发生在其他主要发达经济中持续不发达的地区)、文化(最初发生在该国政治文化薄弱和社会资本水平较低的地区)还是制度(发生的原因是选举制度的特定特征与政党制度的竞争动态相结合)，以及这些因素可能如何相互作用。由于家庭责任和医疗问题，这名调查员的生产力最近受到了暂时的干扰。这项拟议中的研究涉及智力方向的重大转变，这将推动调查人员进入她的学科中更核心、更明显的领域。这样的转变需要非同寻常的研究资源，特别是减少教学的时间间隔，以便投入足够的时间进行研究。

The purpose of this project is to assemble and analyze an annual database covering Italy's 32 electoral districts examining possible correlates of political corruption, covering the period from 1948 to 1994. Political corruption is operationalized as requests by magistrates to parliament to lift the parliamentary immunity of a member of the Chamber of Deputies in order to proceed with legal prosecution on charges of malfeasance. The data collected will include sociological, demographic, economic and political characteristics of electoral districts in order to study the characteristics of districts prone to more or less corruption. Italy is an especially good case to investigate since the country had the highest levels of political corruption of any wealthy democratic nation in the postwar era. The persistent and extreme nature of political corruption there generates unique data available and potentially permits systematic causal analysis. A cross-sectional (subnational) time-series analysis of political corruption in postwar Italy can ascertain whether the determinants of political corruption in democratic settings are largely economic (occurring in pockets of persistent underdevelopment in an otherwise largely developed economy, for instance), cultural (occurring initially in those parts of the country marked by weak political cultures and low levels of social capital), or institutional (occurring because of specific features of the electoral system acting in combination with competitive dynamics of the party system), as well as how such factors may interact. The investigator's productivity has recently suffered temporary interruption due a combination of family responsibilities and medical problems. The research proposed involves a major shift in intellectual direction, one that will propel the investigator into a more central and visible area of her discipline. Such a shift requires unusual research resources, and especially an interval of reduced teaching in order to devote adequate time to research.