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‘Keep friends close, but enemies closer’: connections and political careers

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Abstract

Using newly collected data on ties between local politicians in Italy from 1985 onwards, this paper studies the relation between cross-party connections and future career prospects. Exploiting a difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that ruling coalition members connected with the leader of the opposition in local councils are twice as likely to be promoted to the local government. The results are confirmed with a number of placebo exercises. Interestingly, the effect of connections with the leader of the rivals disappears when I consider appointments to boards of state-owned enterprises or to other councils in which the party faces different politicians as opponents. A possible mechanism that may account for these results is that connected politicians act as political brokers and smooth the relationship between government and opposition. Finally, connected politicians are less educated than the average appointed official, indicating that political selection is negatively affected (Besley et al. in Econ J 121(554):F205–F227, 2011).

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Notes

  1. As an example, in April 2013 President Obama took a group of Republican senators to dinner (The Washington Post 6 March, 2013) and asked Republican Paul Ryan to lunch at the White House. According to the sociologist Neil Gross, the goal of those meetings was ‘to build personal relationships that might erode partisan gridlock’. In another example, Jess Phillips, a Labour MP in the UK, reveals that cross-party friendship ‘can force the government to change what they’re going to put in a bill before they do it’ (The Guardian, 15 October, 2017). In addition see Saia (2018)

  2. For example, preventing severe and damaging forms of opposition such as strikes, demonstrations and filibustering.

  3. Grembi et al. (2016) provide accurate identification assumptions and suggest diagnostic instruments for this methodology.

  4. The surprising size of the results is comparable to those of related works on connections with politicians, like (Dal Bó et al., 2009) who find that one extra term in the US Congress more than doubles the probability of having a relative entering Congress later on, or Gagliarducci and Manacorda (2016), who find that a relative in politics means to the family an extra income of € 9000 per year from the private sector.

  5. A notion introduced by Burt (1992) that denotes the absence of a connection between two separated clusters in a network, and the potential gains whenever a node fills it. In this case it refers to the lack of a connection between two clusters, the majority and the opposition, and the possibility of politicians being able to access better careers by bridging this gap through weak ties with the leader of the opposition.

  6. decreto legislativo n. 112/1998 and art. 19 del decreto legislativo 18 agosto 2000, n. 267.

  7. Local SOEs employ approximately 500,000 people in all sectors of the economy, and the total sum of transfers in the state is estimated to be euros 16.5 billion (1% of GDP) per year. V. and Pinelli, D. (2016). Local State-Owned Enterprises in Italy: Inefficiencies and Ways Forward. European Commission, Economic Brief 10. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

  8. Provinces did not have any disclosure requirements with regard to their SOEs before 2010. In the interests of efficiency and transparency, over the last eight years, different regulations have obliged administrative units to completely disclose the ownership of their SOEs.

  9. Legge 25 marzo 1993, n. 81.

  10. Decreto legislativo 18 agosto 2000, n. 267 (known as ‘Testo Unico degli Enti locali’).

  11. Legge 24 dicembre 2007, n\(^\circ\)244.

  12. With regard to SOEs of which the administration owns less than 50%, the public owner might still have an influence on the appointments. However, because of a lack of any information on the structure of the rest of the ownership, it is conservative to refer just to those for which the public owner has full control over the appointments.

  13. D.Lgs. n. 80/1998 and il D.Lgs. n. 165 del 2001.

  14. 8101 in 2010, and 8071 in 2014.

  15. The size of a local council is a function of the population of the territory.

  16. Both the number and the ownership structures of Italian SOEs were very vague for many years and cannot be fully uncovered because of the lack of any disclosure requirements until 2010.

  17. Articolo 16, comma 17, della legge n. 148 del 2011.

  18. Some politicians were always affiliated as members of civic lists for which their names are not reported. Because I do not have any way of identifying their political affiliation, I drop those observations. This accounts for 18% of the Connected politicians.

  19. If parties were able to manipulate the difference in vote share against the opposition, my RD setup would suffer from selection bias. However, it is very hard to argue that a party can manipulate the outcome of an election because the procedures for controlling and counting the votes are very stringent, and representatives from any party running in the election are allowed to be present during the counting in any polling station.

  20. These data are available from 2004 onwards.

  21. The lack of variation at government level would require the construction of counterfactual laws and policies with respect to those implemented.

  22. Pre-office income of politicians is the other common measure of politicians’ quality. However, its impact on economic performance has not been established yet.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Andrea Mattozzi and Andrea Ichino, for invaluable guidance and constant support and to Omar Bamieh, Nina Bobkova, Jesus Bueren, Andrea Galeotti, Daniela Iorio, David Levine and Ramon Marimon for precious advice and encouragement. I would also like to thank all the seminar speakers at and visitors to the EUI who offered me insightful comments (Marco Battaglini, Yann Bramoulle, Simon Gervais, Stefano Gagliarducci, Roberto Galbiati, Guido Imbens, Fabian Lange, Salvatore Nunnari, Alessandro Pavan, Michelle Sovinsky), as well as all the participants in the EUI Microeconometrics Working Group, the Second Applied Microeconomics Workshop in Bolzano and at the SISP 2016 meeting at University of Milan.

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  1. Bank of Italy, Florence, Italy

    Andrea Cintolesi

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Correspondence to Andrea Cintolesi.

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Appendices

Appendix A: Robustness

See Tables 8, 9, 10 and 11.

Table 8 Robustness: the chance of being appointed to the provincial government as a benefit of a connection only to the leader of the opposition
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Table 9 Covariates balancing in difference-in-difference estimations
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Table 10 Main results robustness: benefits from a connection with the leader of the opposition on the chance to be appointed to the local government when including controls
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Table 11 Narrow bandwidth around the threshold
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Appendix B: Proof

Proof of proposition 1

Take the difference, at \(M_{ijt_{2}}=0\):

$$\begin{aligned} \tau _{w|s=1}^{t_{2}}-\tau _{w|s=0}^{t_{1}}= & {} \tau _{w|s=1}^{t_{2}}-\tau _{w|s=0}^{t_{2}}\\= & {} E^{+}[Y_{ijt_{2}}|w_{jt_{2}}=1, s_{ijt_{2}}=1,c_{mt_{2}}]- E^{-}[Y_{ijt_{2}}|w_{jt_{2}}=0, s_{ijt_{2}}=1,c_{mt_{2}}]- \\{} & {} E^{+}[Y_{ijt_{2}} |w_{jt_{2}}=1, s_{ijt_{2}}=0,c_{mt_{2}}]+E^{-}[Y_{ijt_{2}}|w_{jt_{2}}=0, s_{ijt_{2}}=0, c_{mt_{2}}] \\= & {} E^{+}[Y_{ijt_{2}}|w_{jt_{2}}=1, s_{ijt_{2}}=1,c_{mt_{2}}]- E^{+}[Y_{ijt_{2}}|w_{jt_{2}}=1, s_{ijt_{2}}=0,c_{mt_{2}}]\\= & {} \tau _{s|w=1}^{t_{2}} \end{aligned}$$

In the first line I use Assumption 2, and in the third I use Assumption 3.

Appendix C: Party affiliations and ideological measure

Here I report the list that I use for the party affiliation. I use the most recent affiliation of the politician among those listed before. Centre politicians are a very small minority of the sample used in the main estimations, however, results are robust to considering Centre politicians as Lefty or Righty.

Right: “ALLEANZA NAZIONALE" (0.1) - “CASA DELLE LIBERTA" (0.2) - “CEN-DES(CONTR.UFF.)" (0.2) - “CEN-DES(LS.CIVICHE)" (0.2) - “DESTRA" (0.1) - “FI-ALTRI" (0.2) - “FI-AN" (0.2) - “FI-CCD-AN" (0.2) - "FI-UDC" (0.25) - “FORZA IT-POLO POP." (0.25) - “FORZA ITALIA" (0.2) - “FORZA ITALIA-PRI" (0.25) - “IL POPOLO DELLA LIBERTA’" (0.2) - “IL POPOLO DELLA LIBERTA’ - ALTRI" (0.2) - “IL POPOLO DELLA LIBERTA - LA DESTRA" (0.2) - “IL POPOLO DELLA LIBERTA - LEGA NORD" (0.1) - “L.NORD-CIVICHE" (0) - “L.NORD-PATTO D." (0) - “L.NORD-PPI" (0.1) - “LEGA LOMB-LEGA NORD" (0) - “LEGA LOMBARDA" (0) - “LEGA NORD" (0) - “LEGA NORD-ALTRE" (0) - “LG.VENETA REPUBBLICA" (0) -“PDL - UNIONE DI CENTRO" (0.3) - “POLO PER LE LIBERTA" (0.2).

Centre: “ALL.POP." (0.35) - “CATTOLICI LIBERALI" (0.35) - “CCD-PPI" (0.35) - “CDU" (0.4) -“CENTRO" (0.5) - “CENTRO CRIST.DEM." (0.45) - “DC" (0.45) - “DEM.CRIST. AUTONOMIE - ALTRI" (0.45) - “POPOLARI" (0.45) - “POPOLARI DEMOCRATICI" (0.55) - “POPOLARI LIBERALI" (0.45) - “POPOLARI RETICI" (0.45) -“PPI (POP)" (0.45) -“RINNOVAMENTO" (0.5) - “U.D.EUR" (0.55) -“U.D.EUR POPOLARI" (0.55) - “UNIONE DI CENTRO" (0.45) -“UNIONE DI CENTRO - CIVICA" (0.45) -“POLO CIVICO DI CENTRO" (0.5) -

Left: “CEN-SIN(CONTR.UFF.)" (0.7) -“CEN-SIN(LS.CIVICHE)" (0.7) -“DEM.SIN-ALTRI" (0.75) -“DEM.SIN-COM.IT-F.VER" (0.85) -“DEMOCRATICI SINISTRA" (0.75) -“DI PIETRO ITALIA DEI VALORI" (0.65) - “DL.LA MARGHERITA" (0.6) -“DS-SDI-ALTRI" (0.7) - “L’ULIVO" (0.65) - “L’UNIONE" (0.65) -“LA MARG." (0.6) -“LA MARGHERITA" (0.6) -“LISTA ARCOBALENO" (0.9) -“LISTA DI PIETRO" (0.65) - “PART.DEMOCRATICO- ALTRI" (0.65) -“PARTITO DEMOCRATICO" (0.65) -“PARTITO DEMOCRATICO - CIVICA" (0.65) -“PARTITO DEMOCRATICO-DI PIETRO IT. VALORI" (0.6) -“PARTITO DEMOCRATICO-P.SOCIALISTA" (0.65) -“PARTITO DEMOCRATICO-RIF.COMUNISTA" (0.75) - “PDS" (0.8) - “RIFONDAZIONE COMUNISTA" (0.9) -“SINISTRA" (0.8) - “SINISTRA DEMOCRATICA" (0.8) - “SINISTRA UNITA" (0.8) -“UNIONE DEM." (0.7) - “UNITI NELL’ULIVO" (0.65) -“SINISTRA ECOLOGIA LIBERTA’" (0.85) - “RIFOND.COM." (0.9) - “RIF.COM." (0.9) - “PARTITO COMUNISTA ITALIANO" (0.95) -“PARTITO COMUNISTA" (1) - “PARTITO COMUNISTA DEI LAVORATORI" (1).

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Cintolesi, A. ‘Keep friends close, but enemies closer’: connections and political careers. Public Choice (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-024-01152-6

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