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This paper provides, trough different indicators, empirical evidence on the presumably high relevance of corruption in Italian politics and administration, providing an explanation of how this "obscure" side of Italian politics - a pervasive market for corrupt exchanges - has found its way to regulate its hidden activities within an informal institutional framework, i.e. systemic corruption. A general theoretical framework for the analysis of limits and "windows of opportunity" in Italian anticorruption policies will then be provided, crossing the degree of salience and politicization of corruption issue to explain how in different periods such variables shaped such policy arena. Finally, it will be shown how occasionally this dark side of Italian politics clashed with the clean side of politics, focusing on the reasons of the weak political accountability of Italian politicians involved in corruption scandals in the last decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At least since the 1990s, corruption has continued to be listed as one of the major shortcomings affecting old and new European democracies. In spite of that, measuring political corruption is still a tricky task. In this scenario, some recent studies proposed to turn the attention to the judicial actions to curb corruption, through criminal prosecution, shedding light specifically on the investigations involving high-level politicians (Popova and Post 2018; Dallara 2019). In this paper we aim to present data about judicial prosecution of political corruption in Italy, emphasizing how the number of investigations involving political actors seems rather high, although relatively few cases end with a conviction. Moreover, we aim to suggest some explanatory factors that could account for this situation. Among them: the salience of the issue in the political and public debate; the governance structure of the Italian judicial system and some characters of the Italian criminal law and procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]