Corruption prevention: first evidences from the 2015 RPC survey for Italian municipalities

Corruption prevention is noticeably interwoven with the social integrity and overall quality of life of a Country. The Italian “anti-corruption law” of 2012 introduces a new figure, the prevention-of-corruption supervisor, who yearly reports, through a pre-specified questionnaire (named the RPC form), if and how prevention measures are implemented within the public institution he/she represents. We use the response pattern to the questionnaire provided by a sample of Italian municipalities for a twofold purpose: (i) providing a summary measure of corruption prevention accomplished by the sample at issue; (ii) classifying and qualifying the municipalities according to their behaviour in terms of corruption prevention using a latent class model. Results show that municipalities can be partitioned into two groups, according to their virtuosity. Moreover, we observe that virtuous municipalities are the biggest ones (i.e., on account of the resident population), which experienced at least one corruptive event over the past year.