Each mafioso can mobilize forty to fifty dependent voters on command
Evidence
According to Calderone, each member of a mafia family can count on about forty or fifty relatives and friends “who slavishly follow his directions. This gives some idea of the importance of the role of the mafia in electoral contests. It is enough for the regione to suggest voting for a given parry for tens of thousands of votes to converge on that party, with the result that candidates who are not hostile to the mafia, or who even favor it, are elected” (AC: I, 260-270). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 472
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Quantifies the mafia’s clientelist vote bloc — the raw scale that lets a single mafia family swing elections, feeding the private-protection market model.
Related
- Mafia electoral support is a directed investment in protective politicians, not generic partisanship. (similarity 0.83)
- Each man of honor could command forty to fifty blindly obedient allies (similarity 0.79)
- Italian politicians allied with the mafia to guarantee vote sales across parties. (similarity 0.78)