Zusammenfassung:
Organised crime groups often deliver electoral support to politicians, yet how they are rewarded remains unclear. Using data from Sicilian municipalities (1992–2022), we show that narrowly won races by Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi's party, coincide with sharp declines in the reallocation of confiscated mafia assets—but only in mafia-controlled areas. Exploiting historical variation in the mafia's vote-buying capacity, we find that municipalities with stronger historical ties experience larger post-election declines, exclusively under Berlusconi's governments. Instrumenting modern support with this proxy further reinforces the plausibly causal evidence that national authorities reward organised crime through policy inaction.