Parasites, Colluders, and Adversaries: Explaining Mafia Strategies Toward Public Institutions in Italy

Organized crime groups use coercion, corruption, and collusion with political actors to achieve their aims. Why do organized crime organizations sometimes quietly coexist with local authorities, sometimes collude with them, and at other times threaten or attack them? Once restricted to few areas in advanced democracies, recent literature and media attention have shown how the impact of organized crime on political arenas is spreading across new and old democracies. This article examines how local political and economic conditions shape the strategies that organized crime adopts toward public institutions. We propose a typology of three main strategies—parasitic, collusive, and adversarial—and explore the conditions under which each emerges. Using an original data set covering almost 8000 Italian municipalities, we show that collusion is most likely where weak political parties leave local political systems open to infiltration, while adversarial strategies arise where high levels of public spending make control over resources especially valuable. The analysis demonstrates that criminal behavior is not random but responds to identifiable political and economic incentives. Beyond the Italian case, these findings illuminate how variations in democratic institutions and local economies can foster different forms of organized crime behavior.