ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss a main issue for the analysis of political corruption: the role of political parties. They describe the changing role of the political parties in situation of systemic corruption, focusing in particular on the distortion in the institutional policy making which corruption brings about. The authors analyze the supply of political protection which can be "produced" and exchanged by political parties through corrupt transactions. They look at the development of "consociational" agreements between different political parties—mutual pacts of reciprocal protection against scandals. The authors compare their results with the information available on other countries, focusing especially on the central question of the cost of politics in contemporary democracies. They emphasize that interpretations have concentrated prevalently on the "visible" side of the party, neglecting what has taken place in the "hidden" party structure. The Italian (corrupt) party system has often been described as a partitocrazia.
