Democracy’s need for consensus forces complicity with the mafia
Evidence
Italy did once have a power which was largely independent of the mafia, or at least of the social strata supporting it, and which did contribute to a partial undoing of the mafia (Duggan 1985): this was of course the Fascist regime. In contrast, democracy, by its very nature, has to rely for consensus on larger parts of the population. Thus the temptation to come to terms with those who hold a monopoly of people’s votes, regulate the dispensation of political trust, and somehow guarantee local ‘law and order’, has been strong, and in several instances has proved irresistible. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2196
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Causal claim that democracy structurally cannot provide the independent coercive power needed to break the mafia — bears on the trust-needs-observable-constraints thesis.
Related
- Only authoritarian central power, not democracy, can dismantle the mafia (similarity 0.91)
- Democracy’s need for votes makes it complicit with the mafia (similarity 0.90)
- Societies built on mutual distrust can stabilize into enduring structures. (similarity 0.79)
- Sicilians distrusted state justice and law enforcement since at least the sixteenth century (similarity 0.79)
- Demand for authoritarian institutions arises from popular despair at democratic disorder. (similarity 0.78)
- The Mafia institutionalized distrust itself as a mechanism of control (similarity 0.78)