Organized Crime and Government Trust under the Covid-19 pandemic. The case study of Sicily.

Abstract: Do municipalities in which organized crime is strongly established present lower Covid-19 vaccination rates, as a proxy for government trust? This paper aims to answer this question in the specific case of the Italian region of Sicily. Specifically, the analysis exploits a panel dataset of 390 Sicilian municipalities over 107 weeks (between the 27th of December 2020 and the 1st of January 2023) to study if areas with a higher presence of the Mafia, measured through historical sources and more recent data, negatively correlate with the cumulative weekly percentage of Covid-19 vaccinations per municipality. The main OLS results show that towns with a more established presence of the Mafia have lower levels of first-dose vaccinations during the first four months after the beginning of the vaccination campaign. This correlation is stronger and more persistent if more recent Mafia measurements are implemented. However, from March 2021, areas historically affected by the Mafia start to present higher vaccination rates, suggesting a potential involvement of organized crime in mobilizing the population to get vaccinated in order to gain more social consensus. However, due to the non-random distribution of the Mafia, these main findings may not be interpreted as a causal relationship. The study contributes to the literature on organized crime and government trust during socio-economic shocks, during which the timely and effective policy intervention of official institutions is crucial to avoid the rise of the Mafia consensus among the population.