With a Little Help from My Friends. Political Competition with Interest Groups

Abstract

Higher electoral competition reinforces the position of special interest groups, which can endorse politicians in exchange for the support of specific policies. This paper formalizes this intuition and test it on Italian electoral data, using the 1991 electoral reform as an exogenous source of variation in electoral competition. Focusing on organized crime as a form of special interest group, our differences-in-differences estimates suggest that, after the reform, organized crime-prone areas reported higher vote shares awarded to the party traditionally supported by criminal organizations and a larger dispersion of votes across candidates of the same party.