Preventing Capture: Special Interest Influence in Regulation and How to Limit It

Recent crises in (de)regulated industries – most notably, the financial system’s collapse, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the 2006 West Virginia mine disaster – have made it clear that regulation is both necessary and, in many cases, in need of significant improvement. Now more than ever, we need to know when and how regulation can most effectively channel economic activity in safe and productive directions. Unfortunately, contemporary scholarship often falls short in identifying which regulatory regimes are necessary, which are successful, and how weak (or “captured”) regulation might be improved. Careful observation (and even gut instinct) suggests that reality is more complicated. Rather than seeing uniform and complete capture, observers see a spectrum, with some regulations and regulatory agencies doing a better job than others of resisting undue influence from special interests and achieving the common good. 

The Tobin Project’s upcoming volume, Preventing Capture: Special Interest Influence in Regulation, and How to Limit It, will employ a broad set of methodological tools as well as rigorous evidentiary standards in the course of identifying regulatory successes and failures in recent American experience and the conditions that foster success rather than failure.  The purpose of the work is not only to clarify capture theory and its limits, but also to provide a positive contribution to the understanding of regulation and how best to safeguard it from undue influence. In addition to advancing research and understanding within academia, the work will ideally be useful to a wide variety of policymakers and regulators, both in the legislature and executive branch. Edited by Dan Carpenter (Harvard University, Government) and David Moss (Harvard Business School), the book will offer cutting-edge analysis of capture, its limits, and possibilities for preventing undue (and deleterious) influence in regulatory settings.