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Policy Sciences
Erschienen in: Policy Sciences 2/2019

10.11.2018 | Research Article

Governing by contract as a way to reduce crime? An impact evaluation of the large-scale policy of security pacts

verfasst von: Marco Calaresu, Moris Triventi

Erschienen in: Policy Sciences | Ausgabe 2/2019

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Abstract

In the last decades, governing by contracts, and in particular security contracts and pacts, has been increasingly promoted as a principal means of advancing crime prevention and governing security issues. Security pacts are a form of contract in which various institutional actors declare publicly to approve a common line of action, and/or taking mutual commitments and measures to prevent and control crime and disorder. Unfortunately, impact evaluations of the policy outcomes of security pacts are lacking. In this article, we aim to provide the first rigorous evaluation of the impact of a large-scale policy based on security pacts (involving around 12 million people) on various types of crimes in Italy. We built an ad hoc macro-level panel dataset of the 103 Italian provinces, with indicators covering a period spanning between 2004 and 2013. We applied generalized difference-in-difference models exploiting variation in the time and place in which the policy was adopted. Results indicate that security pacts had a limited impact on crime one year after the adoption, but significantly reduced thefts and micro-criminality two years after the adoption. We also found evidence of heterogeneous effects along province population size, with the largest effects in the larger provinces and null effects in the smaller ones. These findings are robust to a number of different sensitivity checks.
Vorheriger Artikel The governance of self-organization: Which governance strategy do policy officials and citizens prefer?
Nächster Artikel Towards productive functions? A systematic review of institutional failure, its causes and consequences

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Fußnoten
1
As referred by Anderson (2010, 8-9), “Policy outputs are the direct result of the decision-making process which usually involves the adoption of a certain programme, law or regulation. They are defined by the content of a public policy, as it is fixed in legal or administrative documents, and can encompass both substantive and procedural aspects”.
 
2
As stated by Knill and Tosun (2012, 28-29) “Policy outcomes are closely related to the stages of policy implementation and evaluation, [while] policy impacts focus on the extent to which a policy decision and its subsequent implementation have actually brought about the expected results, indicating that they are mainly assessed at the evaluation stage”.
 
3
We use here the definition of “impact evaluation” as proposed by Knill and Tosun (2012, 175), which affirm, “Impact evaluation concerns the establishing of a causal link between the policy and its effects, which can be either policy outcomes or impacts”.
 
4
The study of a crucial case of this type should present the requirements of prominence, significance and representativeness, which justify the choice of a specific case to be empirically tested (George and Bennett 2005), according to the logic of “if I cannot make it there, I cannot make it anywhere” (Levy 2008, 12).
 
5
It worth noticing, as referred by Baccetti (2011, 164) that “the Italian words ‘Regione’, ‘Provincia’ and ‘Comune’, unlike their English equivalent, refer to both the relevant geographical area and to the local government body associated with that geographical area.”.
 
6
NUTS provides a uniform, consistent breakdown of territorial units for the production of regional statistics for the European Union (Eurostat 2011).
 
7
The Region of Aosta Valley is the sole exception: it is not subdivided into provinces, and provincial functions are exercised by the region.
 
8
Although is beyond the scope of this work, it can be said that the recently introduced metropolitan cities in Italy are hybrid administrative entities within the Italian local government system, representing both a metropolitan community, coinciding with the old provincial one, and also the various municipalities located within the boundary of the metropolitan area (see Longo and Mobilio 2016).
 
9
The South Tyrol and Trentino-Alto Adige are autonomous provinces: unlike all other provinces in Italy they have the same legislative powers as regions and are not subordinated to the region they are part of, namely the region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol.
 
10
These include the following cities: Bari, Bologna, Cagliari, Catania, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome and Turin.
 
11
There are many specific causal mechanisms by which these crime prevention actions could reduce crime, but a detailed discussion of them is beyond the scope of this paper. The interested reader could refer, for example to the pioneering work of Tilley (1993), about the evaluation of the Safer Cities programme.
 
12
See Appendix for details about our strategy to harmonize the units of analysis over time.
 
13
We decided to exclude data previous to 2004 due to an important redefinition of the ways several of our indicators have been collected and reported by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT).
 
14
We should be cautious in interpreting the results related to this policy outcome also because summing the absolute values of different crimes might generate an implicit substitution effect.
 
15
This indicator measures the share of persons who have living conditions severely constrained by a lack of resources. In particular, they experience at least 4 out of 9 following deprivations items: they cannot afford 1) to pay rent or utility bills, 2) keep home adequately warm, 3) face unexpected expenses, 4) eat meat, fish or a protein equivalent every second day, 5) a week holiday away from home, 6) a car, 7) a washing machine, 8) a colour TV and 9) a telephone.
 
16
This indicator includes individuals aged 0–59 living in households in where the adults work less than 20% of their total work potential during the last years.
 
17
This indicator measures the percentage of the persons in the total population with an equalized disposable income below the risk-of-poverty threshold (which is set at 60% of the national median equalized disposable income).
 
18
It is worth noticing that since not all municipalities have taken part to the security pacts within the same policy, this parameter might resemble more an estimate of an Intention-To-Treat (ITT) parameter in randomized controlled trials with non-compliers than an Average Treatment on the Treated (ATT).
 
19
The total number of intentional homicides in Italy in the year 2013 is of 868 compared to 524 in 2012. This increase is largely due to the (controversial) classification as intentional homicides in the Province of Agrigento (which passes from 2 intentional homicides to the total number of 372) of the deaths of 366 African migrants in a shipwreck a quarter-mile away from the coast of Lampedusa, an Italian island barely 70 miles from northern Africa.
 
20
See figure A2 for an example on the thefts rate, the only one in which we find the main effect of security pacts. Additional tests in line with Angrist and Pischke (2009, 238-239) suggest that the assumption of no anticipatory effects cannot be rejected. This provides additional evidence for the robustness of our finding.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Governing by contract as a way to reduce crime? An impact evaluation of the large-scale policy of security pacts
verfasst von
Marco Calaresu
Moris Triventi
Publikationsdatum
10.11.2018
Verlag
Springer US
Erschienen in
Policy Sciences / Ausgabe 2/2019
Print ISSN: 0032-2687
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0891
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-018-9337-1

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