Liz Dávid-Barrett is Professor of Governance and Integrity at the University of Sussex and Programme Director of GI ACE and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption. Her research focuses on corruption risks at the interface of business and government, including in state capture, public procurement and bribery in international business – and on approaches to countering these risks, including transnational governance networks in law enforcement and investigative journalism. Tom Shipley is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Corruption, embedded within the GI ACE programme. His work focuses on state capture in Sub-Saharan Africa and the role of international institutions in driving anti-corruption reform.
We were delighted to co-chair a panel on state capture at the recent annual meeting of the European Consortium on Political Research in Thessaloniki, Greece. The five papers – outlined below – demonstrated how the field is developing, with more work emerging on the different mechanisms of capture, new datasets being used for analysis and fresh attention to the topic from some international actors.
In the first paper, ‘Struggling to Prevail: Corporate Political Activism Dynamics Amidst Institutional Decline’, David Murillo from Ramon Llull University in Barcelona presented a valuable case study of capture in Peru. Corporate influence over state structures has very long roots in Peru, we learned, but has evolved over time with new players emerging and as new institutional settings come into being. The authors distinguish between discursive power, as the ability of business to shape perceptions, identities, and public opinion, and instrumental power, which involves direct influence through methods like lobbying and campaign finance. Structural power highlights the inherent political advantage business holds within the market economy system.
Alessia Damonte from Italy’s Universita degli Studi di Milano presented ‘Bending Bureaucracy from Within’, in which she grapples with the important question of what constitutes legitimate or illegitimate political influence over the bureaucracy. She provides a very helpful framework for making defensible judgments grounded in a synthesis of different models of bureaucratic functioning. The model could potentially provide a way for developing indicators and early warning signs of political capture of bureaucracies.
New indicators were utilised by the next presenter, Luiz Maues Ventura from the National Major University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru – specifically, Daniel Kaufmann’s State Capture Index. In a large-n analysis focusing on the Americas, the relationship between degree and stability of capture is explored. Some countries demonstrate stable low levels of capture, such as Canada, Chile and Uruguay, while others experience stable high levels of capture (e.g., Venezuela and Nicaragua). Perhaps the most interesting set to explore further in the planned case studies is those experiencing moderate but volatile levels of capture such as Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia.
Fanni Gyurko from the University of Oxford presented a paper on ‘National Consultations in Hungary as a Form of State Capture’. In this she showed how these ‘consultations’, ostensibly a method of collecting evidence about public opinion to inform public policy, are designed and administered by the Orban government in ways that prejudice the results. This is a fascinating case study of how state funds can be used for party political ends, and how information can be manipulated to frame and constrain debate in the service of state capture.
Finally, our own paper explored how the IMF has come to recognize that high-level systemic forms of corruption such as state capture can undermine macroeconomic stability, and how this has led to the adoption of a new approach to anti-corruption since 2018. Our research traces how this came about through iterative interactions between staff and shareholder interests, and asks how the increasingly political approach of this powerful actor might change post-capture bargaining dynamics among domestic groups.
Ours was not the only panel to consider questions of state capture. An excellent session on ‘mafiocracy’, chaired by Bonnie Palifka, analysed the role of organised crime in state capture from different perspectives, while other sessions in the Section on Corruption and Integrity also included papers on specific aspects of state capture.
Beyond our section, we were struck by how many other panels at the conference presented research on similar themes but used different terminology. There were numerous papers on democratic backsliding and authoritarianism, for example, as well as investigations into examples of executive aggrandisement, but these tend not to frame the phenomenon in terms of state capture or even corruption.
From our perspective, some of these discussions could benefit from engaging with the conceptual framework of state capture. This would encourage researchers to interrogate the different types of captors (business groups, political parties, organised crime) and motivations (enrichment, power, impunity) that often lie behind executive power grabs. Moreover, more comparative analysis on the mechanisms of capture – changing the rules, diverting resources, and disabling accountability institutions – is badly needed to better understand what makes a state vulnerable to capture. Research on harms is also more prevalent in the corruption part of the sub-field, whereas scholars of democratisation focus on erosion of the democratic process and institutions as primary harms without always spelling out what this means for economies and societies.