Partitocrazia

Since I am still mucking around in the depths of half-baked theory on the links between political parties and the incentives that they set up for individual politicians to promote and implement anti-corruption strategies, I will start my first week in this blogging experiment in Italy – homeland of entrenched political corruption in the party system. As my foremost focus is my dissertation (or so I would like to tell myself and others), I'll start with the progress that I have made this week. It's Monday, so my progress is quite watery. At this point, I am trying to sort out which mechanisms are used by political parties to incentivise individual politicians not only to adhere to the social contract while in office, but also to institutionalise transparency and punishment mechanisms for those individuals and groups that do partake in corrupt acts. The Italian case will be very useful once I get to the complete systemisation and entrenchment of corrupt transactions at the party system level. Specifically, this will help address how political corruption affects bureaucratic corruption. But here I am getting ahead of myself. So, this week's goal is to redo my theory for the umpteenth time and to make it presentable to my oh-so-very-patient supervisor.

This means that this week I will be undertaking the task of selecting and preparing a delicious Italian meal. Not sure what I will do for the culture aspect yet, but keep your eyes peeled for a short story or anecdote with an Italian flavour. This is a very basic first week for this blog, but hopefully it will get more interesting as I progress with my dissertation and get a better feel for this project.