Public domain/http://www.torange.us/Objects/money/Payment-Cash-(cash-currency)-Euros-in-an-envelope-4724.html.The Italian government has made a mistake. Not the worst a government can make, nor is this the worst government that Italy has had: still it is a manifest and damaging mistake, and the government seems obstinate. Not even the criticism of the head of the anti-corruption agency (‘very mistaken’) and the national anti-mafia prosecutor (‘a favour to crime’) moved it. So a civil society organization has launched a petition, to persuade the government to change its mind.
At stake is more than just one mistake. Since the turn of the century, in fact, politics in Italy has become increasingly personalized and hierarchical. This evolution is not unique to my country, of course, but it seems particularly pronounced there: and the logic of this model tends to stifle public debate, discourage political participation, and exacerbate both the permeability of the state to special interests and the parallel difficulty of diffused, non-organized interests to make themselves heard. (I touched this problem on this blog, here and here).
The government operates under the incentives that this logic generates. If powerful interest groups demand policies beneficial to them but harmful to the public interest, its incentives are likely to lead the government to oblige, because the citizens who bear the cost, in often imperceptible measure, typically lack the information, the spur, and the organization to react. For reasons that Mancur Olson explained in The Logic of Collective Action, fifty years ago, citizens generally remain silent. But their silence reinforces that logic, for political accountability weakens if it is rarely enforced.
