ABSTRACT
Since political corruption was one of the principal structural causes of the transformation of the Italian party system, and Tangentopoli was one of the major factors precipitating the traditional parties’ collapse, this chapter explores the impact of these two phenomena in some detail. As the root cause underlying the routinization of political corruption, the structure and operation of partitocrazia is discussed. The chapter examines the logic and dynamic of the clientelistic relationships which partitocrazia sustained and analyses how these facilitated the spread of corruption. It discusses why the Tangentopoli investigations took place when they did and, finally, considers their party and electoral effects. Clientelism was perfectly adapted to trasformismo, relying, as it did, on maintaining the ill-defined parliamentary cliques and the mass of non-aligned deputies in a state of permanent atomization. Clientelism was practised in a variety of ways. Sometimes, it was of a repressive, bureaucratic kind.
