Italy has a very bad reputation of corrupt Country. Regrettably, such a bad reputation is not pie in the sky and finds roots in numerous European studies, in the monitoring activities of international bodies such as GRECO, in the authoritative allegations made by field experts, who qualify Italian corruption as systemic, other than in a widespread perception of corruption. All converge in outlining a worrying scenario of extensive corruption and mismanagement. The picture is aggravated by the complex, hidden and collusive nature of corruption, which makes corruption control objectively challenging. Moreover, controlling corruption is not just a matter of repression. Corruption control seeks to reduce the scope and likelihood of corruption and, as such, has both a repressive and preventative dimension. The acknowledgment that corruption repression is just the tip of a grey and multifaceted iceberg and its nature of belated intervention with respect to the occurrence of corrupt events pushed governments around the globe to take account of further tools of preventative nature to tackle such a complex phenomenon. In this direction, law n.190 of 2012 introduced in Italy a preventative logic to corruption control. In this new legislative frame, the Italian Anticorruption Authority (ANAC) is the new agency in charge of the drawing of a preventive strategy against corruption, the supervision of its implementation by each public entity - through the adoption of Three Years Plans – called Piani Triennali per la Prevenzione della Corruzione”, PTPC) for integrity and transparency – and the supervision over transparency of public bodies. In the new judicial system, each Italian public institution (municipalities, regions, universities, local health units, public research institutions, etc.) has to adopt a PTPC, which provides an assessment of the different exposure levels of offices to the risks of corruption and specifies the organisational changes designed to prevent such risks. The PTPC is adopted, within each public body, by a new figure called prevention-of-corruption supervisor who has, among his/her tasks, to fill in an annual report (the RPC forms) to document which preventative measures defined by the PTPC have been accomplished and to what extent.
By exploiting the data contained in the RPC forms in the first three years of application of law n.190 of 2012, in this work we aim at showing the trend in the capacity of Italian administrative institutions to fight the spread of deviant behaviours and corrupted practices in the administration offices they represent, when adopting and executing the preventative measures entrusted by the new national legislation. In so doing, we focus our attention on municipalities, because they are small and homogeneous administrative units providing high detail of anti-corruption behaviours at local level. The study i. provides an Anticorruption Compass delivering a synthetic mapping of compliance that can be used by ANAC to guide its monitoring and control activities; ii. allows us to ascertaining clusters of municipalities characterised by distinctive anti-corruption behaviours, their geographical distribution in the Italian macro-regions, and the association between anti-corruption behaviours and some relevant covariates (e.g., the municipality size).
