Clean Online Seminar: Giovanna Invernizzi

The next CLEAN online seminar will take place on November 9th at 4.30pm Italian time.

The presenter will be Giovanna Invernizzi, PhD candidate at Columbia University. The title of the paper is "Politics be denunciation" (abstract below).

Send an email to gianmarco.daniele@unibocconi.it if you are interested in attending CLEAN online seminars.

Abstract: Political scandals are a fundamental component of today’s politics. Yet, empirical evidence of the strategic determinants of scandals is intrinsically hard to gather, a problem that has significantly limited the study of this important phenomenon. This paper studies political scandals through their denunciation, using original data on 1125 episodes of misbehavior involving Italian MPs (1983-2019). This new dataset allows us to investigate the political nature of denunciations, comparing various types of scandals spanning from corruption to crimes of opinion. Results provide evidence in favor of a political use of denunciations for corruption crimes: when a party weakens, the likelihood that political enemies denounce past misbehavior of members of the weakened party increases, suggesting that the political use of denunciation is elastic to changes in the electoral odds. The timing of past misbehavior is also crucial: members of weakened parties are more likely to be accused of misbehavior that happened a long time before the accusation, which further supports the conjecture that accusations are political.