Democracy’s need for votes makes it complicit with the mafia

Evidence

The second, partially unintentional, mechanism which explains the successful survival of the mafia has to do with the democratic state, which while hostile to such an alternative power as the mafia has also to depend on its capacity to mobilize votes. … In a sense, this implies that in order to get rid of the mafia, what we need is simply another — bigger and better — mafia. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2192

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin trust framework: democratic state depends on mafia for regulating ‘political trust’ and local order — trust requires observable constraints, and here the state trades away its own constraint capacity for votes.
• QUESTION: The ‘bigger and better mafia’ paradox — is this a generalizable claim about legitimate monopolies of force displacing local ones?