From: furio@uiuc.edu (furio ercolessi)
Subject: Re: alt.politics.italy
Reply-To: furio@uiuc.edu (furio ercolessi)
Organization: MRL - UIUC
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 00:01:02 GMT

In article <1ifgviINNj20@darkstar.UCSC.EDU>, bigben@cats.ucsc.edu (Benbuck Nason) writes:
|>In article <1ifd25INNmir@agate.berkeley.edu> luigi@paris.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Luigi Semenzato)
|>writes:
|>>3.  Even a small representation gets you some share of power in
|>>the `lottizzazione' mechanism---the favor system that permeates
|>
|>Could you please explain this mechanism further.  I am not familiar
|>with this term.

Oh, let's try.  Let us take a stupid, insignificant political party with no
purpose whatsoever such as PSDI.  Let us suppose that, as an
initial condition on which I will not elaborate further, this party gets
some tiny vote percentage, say 2%.  So the problem is then why this
percentage does not decay to zero with time--given the apparent total 
lack of any purpose of PSDI--but rather it seems to remain roughly
constant.

With that 2%, the party gets some representatives in the local 
and central administrations.  In the city council of a town, it will
typically be just one person.  That's more than enough! 
If the party is in some way "attached" to the DC-PSI mainstream,
that is, it is not part of the opposition, it will be part of the
"lottization" (sp???) mechanism automatically.

Lottization means that nearly all the high-end positions of
state-related agencies, companies, factories, etc are distributed
between the parties according to their share, more or less.
This includes the train,electricity,telephone,television companies,
state-owned societies manufacturing goods or providing services,
the national council of research, and also a lot of apparently private
entities such as banks and you name it.  You will never be at the
vertices of such companies if you are not _very_ strongly attached
to a political party.  And this could also be - why not? - PSDI!
 
So, with its 2% our PSDI gets about 2% share of all these things
[at zero order in perturbation theory for the physicists out there :-)].
These positions mean power in the most concrete sense.
For example, power to assign jobs. You want a job? Then, a
"recommendation" is a good, often mandatory, starting point.
A recommendation is issued by one of these political guys at the
vertices.  In this way, they can self-generate a support from
the power they have.  People will vote for them because of the
practical advantages they get.  The "ideology" of the party is
unimportant --- in fact, probably even the PSDI politicians have
forgotten what the original ideology of the party was, let alone
ordinary people.

At the national level, every big politician has a huge power in its
own city.  So, he will have a large mass of votes coming from that
city, because of the quantity of jobs he managed to distribute, and
of the quantity of business (such as highways etc) he will be able 
to bring into the local area, etc.  If you own a business operating
in the public administration area, you HAVE to deal with politicians
and pay them (the famous tangents), otherwise you will not get 
any job.  But then, in some way you also become a supporter,
even if disgusted, because if that guy doesn't get renewed and
another guy comes along, you will have to do everything from
scratch, so you hope that the guy stays there. 

By means of these inertial mechanisms, that 2% is sustained.
Of course all this was just an oversimplified attempt to describe
the situation ... any further insight welcome.

|>Please excuse my ignorance, I'm just trying to learn...

And so we are, trying to learn how to kick them in the ass,
and figure out with whom to replace them!!!!
Happy 1993 to the s.c.i. gang, also to the ones still swimming ...

furio
--
Furio Ercolessi
Materials Research Laboratory           |   Intl School for Advanced Studies
Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   |   Trieste, Italy
furio@uiuc.edu                          |   furio@sissa.it
Newsgroups: soc.culture.italian