Summary of JOIE Article by Damiano Fiorillo, Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope, Italy, Michele Mosca Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy, and Luca Pennacchio,Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope, Italy . The full article is available on the JOIE website.
Building on the well-known assertion that “there is nothing worse than the confiscation of assets […] therefore, the best option is to leave”, attributed to the Sicilian–American mafia boss Francesco Inzerillo in a wiretapped conversation during Operation Old Bridge in February 2008, this paper investigates whether and to what extent the confiscation of criminally acquired real estate affects citizens’ trust in public institutions and in the legal system. The analysis focuses on the Italian case, where asset seizure and confiscation have evolved into a distinctive and highly institutionalised policy tool in the fight against mafia-type organisations, embedded within a broader legal and administrative framework aimed at both repression and social and public reallocation.
Adopting an institutional approach, the study conceptualises confiscation as a multifaceted public policy that operates simultaneously on symbolic, political, and material levels. On the symbolic dimension, the deprivation of illicit wealth signals the state’s capacity and willingness to enforce legality and to challenge entrenched forms of criminal power that have historically undermined public authority, democratic governance, and market competition. On the material side, the transformation of confiscated assets into publicly accessible resources—such as social facilities, community centres, educational spaces, agricultural cooperatives, and institutional premises—creates visible and tangible benefits for local communities, potentially reshaping citizens’ everyday interactions with the state. These dual dimensions suggest that confiscation policies may exert complex and context-dependent effects on institutional trust, extending beyond their immediate deterrent or redistributive functions.
The Italian experience in the fight against the mafia provides a particularly suitable empirical setting for examining these mechanisms. Since the introduction of the Rognoni–La Torre law (Law No. 646/1982), Italy has progressively developed an extensive legal architecture that not only enables the identification, seizure, and final confiscation of assets belonging to mafia-type associations, but also regulates their subsequent allocation for social, economic, and institutional uses. The scope of this policy encompasses a wide range of asset categories, including financial resources, movable property, corporate holdings, and, most notably, real estate comprising residential buildings, commercial premises, agricultural land, and industrial facilities. This two-stage process—expropriation followed by reallocation—positions confiscation as a policy that is both punitive and productive, designed to weaken the economic foundations of organised crime while fostering local development and civic engagement. The importance of asset seizure and the subsequent public and social reuse of property confiscated from criminal organisations has also been acknowledged at the European level and is explicitly promoted among Member States in the recent EU Directive 2024/1260 as part of a broader framework for strengthening the effectiveness of anti-organised crime policies.
The empirical analysis combines individual-level data on institutional trust from the Italian National Institute of Statistics’ Aspects of Daily Life survey with the latest regional-level data on confiscated real estate from the National Agency for the Administration and Destination of Seized and Confiscated Assets (ANBSC) in the period 2014–2022. The trust indicators capture citizens’ reported confidence in national Parliament, regional and municipal governments, and the legal system, thereby allowing for a differentiated assessment of institutional legitimacy across multiple tiers of governance. The confiscation data provide detailed information on the volume and distribution of real estate assets subject to final confiscation across Italian regions.
Methodologically, the study employs a combination of linear and non-linear regression models to estimate the relationship between confiscation activity and institutional trust, while accounting for a rich set of individual and contextual control variables, including socio-demographic characteristics, labour market status, income proxies, and regional socio-economic indicators. To address potential endogeneity concerns—particularly the possibility that both confiscation rates and institutional trust may be jointly influenced by unobserved factors related to crime prevalence, governance quality, or civic culture—the analysis is complemented by an instrumental variables strategy. This approach strengthens the causal interpretation of the estimated effects by isolating exogenous variation in confiscation intensity that is plausibly unrelated to contemporaneous shifts in citizens’ trust.
The findings reveal pronounced geographical heterogeneity in the relationship between confiscation and institutional trust. On average, confiscation activity is associated with higher levels of trust in local public institutions, particularly municipal governments, suggesting that the visible reallocation of assets at the community level may enhance perceptions of state responsiveness and effectiveness. Conversely, no uniform positive effect is observed for the national Parliament or for the legal system when the country is considered as a whole.
Disaggregated analyses highlight a stark North–South divide. In Southern regions, where organised crime is more deeply embedded in the social and economic fabric and where confiscation rates are substantially higher, the policy is associated with increased trust not only in local governments but also in Parliament and the legal system. This pattern is consistent with the interpretation that, in high-crime contexts, confiscation serves as a powerful signal of institutional capacity and legal authority, reinforcing the perceived legitimacy of the state across multiple levels. By contrast, in Central and Northern regions, where the presence of mafia-type organisations is less pervasive and often less visible, the positive effect of confiscation is confined to local public institutions, while trust in the legal system appears to decline. This counterintuitive result suggests that, in lower-crime settings, confiscation may be interpreted less as a symbol of institutional strength and more as an indication of underlying criminal infiltration or judicial inefficiency, thereby generating ambivalent or negative perceptions of legal institutions.
The paper contributes to the existing literature in two main respects. First, to the best of our knowledge, it provides the first systematic empirical investigation of the relationship between the confiscation of criminal real estate and citizens’ institutional trust. In doing so, it extends a growing body of research on the economic and political consequences of anti-mafia policies, which has examined the effects of confiscation on property values, market competition, firm performance, bank–firm relationships, and electoral dynamics, by introducing an explicitly institutional and attitudinal dimension. The results indicate that confiscation may generate broader societal benefits that operate indirectly through changes in citizens’ perceptions of state legitimacy and governance quality.
Second, the study enriches the broader literature on the determinants of institutional trust, which has traditionally emphasised the role of individual socio-economic characteristics, cultural factors such as social capital and perceived corruption, and institutional performance indicators related to public service provision and government effectiveness. By foregrounding asset confiscation as a salient policy instrument in contexts affected by organised crime, the paper highlights the importance of law enforcement and redistributive legal interventions as potential drivers of institutional legitimacy. More generally, it underscores the need to consider how policies aimed at addressing illicit economies and criminal governance can shape the relationship between citizens and the state, not only through their material outcomes but also through the symbolic meanings they convey.