Avoiding capture

Abstract

Samuel Bagg's The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy is an excellent book. It lays out and defends, in detail, an ambitious new account of the significance of democratic institutions and practices, which it sees as centrally concerned with avoiding state capture. That account powerfully illuminates many important topics in democratic theory, responding in persuasive and novel ways to old questions as well as offering new areas to explore. However, its near-exclusive focus on domination by the very wealthy may limit the insights it can provide. The idea of state capture's full power may only be made available though by adopting a more varied account of the common good that it stymies, and of the interests that may mobilize against those shared interests.

Samuel Bagg's The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy is an excellent book (2024). It lays out and defends, in detail, an ambitious new account of the significance of democratic institutions and practices. That account rejects the idea that democracy is a form of collective self-rule, instead focusing on the requirement to provide opportunities to challenge whoever holds power, and so prevent them from monopolizing it and directing it to their private advantage rather than the public good. Democracy is a mechanism for avoiding a danger exacerbated by the capacity and sophistication of modern states, that sectional interests will seize or suborn their institutions and their power.

Blocking state capture by dispersing power is unlikely to achieve collective self-rule in any concrete sense, given the many difficulties in understanding just how millions of people can all together decide which shared institutions to create and how to run them. However, it can protect the state's ability to promote the public interest, which would otherwise be undermined by small, typically wealthy, groups taking advantage of its power to promote their own interests at the expense of the common good. While elections and other standard features of democracy, like the rule of law, are vital tools in this struggle against state capture, they are not sufficient. They need to be supplemented by a series of other mechanisms intended to ensure that the bulk of the population has adequate tools to combat the material and organizational advantages held by elites. A realistic picture of how political decisions are made and implemented must acknowledge that there are significant disparities in power between different groups. The Dispersion of Power is centrally concerned with perhaps the most important of those disparities, between the very wealthy and everyone else. It argues powerfully that common understandings of democracy are dangerous precisely because they ignore it, but that its alternative would at least reduce their impacts on our politics.

The Dispersion of Power is part of a growing wave of suspicion about the plausibility of dominant ways of thinking about democracy, both in political science and in political theory. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels' Democracy for Realists is perhaps the paradigmatic, if far from the only, example of that trend in political science (2016). In political theory, it includes not only Bagg's work but also those of other scholars, like Klein (2022) or Prinz and Westphal (2024), focused on the effects of material inequalities, but also arguments to limit popular involvement in politics, like those made by Brennan (2016) and Bell (2015). What these often quite different works share is the sense that democracy, at least as realized in supposedly liberal democratic states like the UK or USA, does not and cannot deliver the goods its supporters have been led to expect. Models of democracy which require it to achieve a general will or elections to hold officials to account are, as Achen and Bartels put it, ‘[h]opelessly naïve theories’ which only serve to distract us from available ‘improvements along entirely different lines’ we might otherwise make (2016: 7). What those alternatives are and why they are valuable is of course a matter of some disagreement, and one obvious strength of The Dispersion of Power is the way it draws together a very wide range of material to present a cohesive alternative account of the value of democratic institutions.

The Dispersion of Power's alternative account is developed through a contrast with and critique of two ways of understanding collective self-rule. The first of these is what it calls ‘responsive representation’. There the idea is that the governors are the agents of the governed, responsible for protecting and promoting their interests in line with their preferences, in particular those expressed at elections. Healthy democratic institutions are then responsive to the interests and preferences of the population. Election-seeking officials attempt to win public support with promises to govern in the interests of the electorate, while the electorate assesses the desirability and feasibility of those promises, as well as the incumbents' record of delivery. The weaknesses of this model are well known, particularly among political scientists who tend to use it to assess the achievements of democratic institutions (Sabl, 2015). It requires that voters reliably judge the performance of their government in comparison with the available alternatives, and then vote on the basis of those judgments in ways which aggregate to form stable and accurate collective verdicts about which set of politicians should rule and how. Yet voters understandably struggle to make informed assessments of policy decisions given their number and complexity, and instead tend to vote on the basis of their social identity, which centrally shapes their understanding and interpretation of events. How and along which cleavages those social identities mobilize depends crucially on how the options are presented, and so whatever collective verdicts do emerge from elections are more a function of the voting and party systems and ideological work done by elites than any underlying popular will.

However, The Dispersion of Power does not only argue that elections are not a reliable mechanism for ensuring political leaders respond to voter preferences, or even that the idea of a popular will to which they might respond is chimerical. It argues that even if political leaders do respond to voter preferences that are not particularly normatively significant, given their ability to influence those preferences. Their ‘ability to influence the meaning and salience of widely shared social identities is a key form of political power’ (45). Shaping the way voters understand and are motivated by the options available to them prevents their exercise of choice from operating as an important check on political decision-making. Instead, political leaders set the terms on which the electorate assesses their decisions, and so avoid being constrained to act only in ways which protect the independent interests of their constituents. Responding to the electorate does not mean promoting the common good, and so we would do better to aim to avoid state capture than to hope for responsiveness.

The second understanding of collective self-rule which The Dispersion of Power criticizes turns away from mass political action and instead towards the possibilities for engagement on a smaller scale. What The Dispersion of Power calls ‘participatory inclusion’ holds out the hope that offering individual citizens opportunities to contribute to decision-making through collaborative and consensual deliberative processes will eliminate or at least reduce ‘information deficits and communication failures’, and so improve and provide greater legitimacy to democratic outcomes (63). However, this hope, typical of the now enormous literature on deliberative democracy (Bächtiger et al., 2018), misconstrues the problems democratic decision-making typically faces. We do not usually face a situation in which we need to ‘enable cooperation between equally situated groups who share most of their interests’, but instead one in which our primary goal should be to ‘resist the dominance of elite interests over those of ordinary people’ (65). Organizing politics around carefully structured moments of discussion or consultation is unlikely to block that dominance. Agendas will be set in advance, shaping discussion around existing institutional priorities. Once discussion begins, its formally neutral character will serve to disguise inequalities in the resources different groups and interests are able to mobilize, favouring those with greater advantages. And once conclusions are reached, they will derive a legitimate finality from their attempt to include all on equal terms, even when that is impossible in the face of ‘deep conflicts of interest and vast asymmetries of power’ (63). Again, focusing on state capture and confronting directly the power of wealthy elites would provide a better account of democracy and the promotion of the common good.

The Dispersion of Power understands state capture simply and without reference to any particular idea of appropriate or legitimate state action, defining it as the use of state power ‘to advance the partial or private interests of a faction or group, at the expense of a broader public interest or common good’ (80). Bagg insists that we do not need a specific conception of the public interest or the common good to identify state capture. As long as there is ‘a pattern of outcomes that clearly favours one group at the expense of others, such as the massive profits of a construction firm that has failed to build a functional railway line’ and some plausible account of how those advantages were created by using state power in ‘noninnocuous ways’, then we can be reasonably sure that state capture has occurred and needs to be addressed (80). We do not need to develop a sophisticated account of the common good or the proper uses of public power to judge whether partial interests are benefiting from their control of government institutions. Instead, we can base that judgment on ‘relatively more secure’ claims about who has gained and who has lost from political action, and why. We can see the problem without having to know first how a perfect system would work, and so can ‘economize on certainty’ by avoiding ‘precise accounts of human interests’ we might otherwise expect to provide ‘normative foundations’ for our judgments (16).

Indeed, once we understand the risks of state capture, we can begin to ‘identify the practices and institutions that will most reliably protect public power’, again economizing on fundamental theory by turning instead to the problems that confront us here and now (82). This is the basis on which The Dispersion of Power constructs its theory of democracy. A wide range of political problems can be understood through the lens of state capture, from regulators who have become dependent on the industries whose behaviour they are supposed to control to authoritarian regimes where the surplus generated by political order is retained by elites with the power to disrupt, undermine or destroy it (83ff). In all these cases, we should think of the basic issue as being the direction of public power away from the public good, and towards partial or private interests. Democratic institutions should be understood as mechanisms to forestall and limit those problems by preventing powerful actors from controlling policy and its implementation.

Traditional liberal prescriptions about the importance of constitutional rules, political and social pluralism and competition, and equal basic liberties together work to secure direct limits on public power. When they function well, they ensure that politicians and officials cannot abuse or entrench their power by structuring ‘political, social and economic power in ways that facilitate and incentivize’ the ‘enforcement’ of ‘formal prohibitions against tyranny’. Power is distributed ‘among different parties or factions’ who compete to protect and promote their interests. The requirement to seek electoral support in order to gain decision-making authority imposes some limits on the extent to which they can prioritize those interests over those of the population at large, while an open and dynamic economy as well as a vibrant civil society prevents particular groups ‘monopolizing control over all the important levers of power in society’ (110, 111, 117). In this way, liberal injunctions to avoid concentrating public power, to encourage competition and to protect individuals against domination and abuses of authority can limit state capture. Together, they block attempts to seize government institutions and direct them to the advantage of partial interests.

Focusing on the way liberal institutions prevent the abuse of political power offers a revisionary account of their significance. They are no longer required by respect for individual freedom or autonomy, as so much of contemporary political philosophy assumes, particularly in its post-Rawlsian, neo-Kantian form. Instead, basic rights and constitutional protections limit the extent to which whoever holds political authority can use it to benefit themselves and their clients rather than the population at large. Yet they are not sufficient to ensure that public power is appropriately directed towards the public good. Background inequalities inevitably influence political decisions and their implementation, so traditional liberal commitments to individual liberties and limits on government power need to be supplemented by more radical policies limiting them and empowering disadvantaged groups.

The Dispersion of Power groups mechanisms to address background inequalities into three categories. First, it classifies policies meant to prevent the development of concentrations of private power under the heading of anti-monopoly. Here, the idea is not just that excess market power, and particularly not only the capability to set prices, should be reduced and ideally eliminated. Anti-monopoly also covers adopting special rules for the extremely wealthy, for example by putting the burden on them to demonstrate, perhaps to a specially convened citizen's jury, that they have paid an appropriate amount of tax, rather than on the tax authorities to show that they have broken the letter of the law (130). The second mechanism meant to limit the material and organizational advantages of the very wealthy and so stop them from being translated into control over public decisions is countervailing power. Limiting the power of the wealthy will not prevent them from bending policy and its implementation towards their interests if there are no other groups, counteracting their influence by trying to protect and promote the interests of comparatively disadvantaged groups. So groups capable of exercising countervailing power need to be encouraged and supported. Finally, systemic redistribution, ideally through unconditional wealth transfers funded from progressive taxation, attacks ‘underlying material, social and cultural asymmetries’ from both ends at once, increasing the resources available to disadvantaged groups by taking them from the advantaged (137).

Focusing on avoiding state capture as the purpose underlying democratic institutions creates new ways to respond to critics of universal suffrage like Bell and Brennan. The problem with their proposals is not that they violate ‘the intrinsic value of political equality and self-government’, neither of which are or plausibly can be realized by democratic decision-making in large societies (179). The point is instead that meritocratic systems or elections with a restricted suffrage would allow incumbents to select either their successors or the electorate that choose them, and so create significant new opportunities for them to entrench themselves and capture powerful institutions. Bell's proposal to implement an idealized version of what he calls the China Model would eliminate important constraints on capture created by political competition and the independent centres of power that sustain it (181ff). These constraints both protect against tyranny – more or less complete domination by whatever elite happens to hold power – as well as more mundane forms of capture, by encouraging and supporting the assertion of interests against the current rulers. Licencing electors much as we licence drivers and doctors, as Brennan suggests, would be similarly problematic (186ff). There is every reason to think restrictions would be manipulated by incumbents and little, if any, to think that better-qualified voters avoid the pathologies of voter choice or can be trusted to promote or protect the interests of disenfranchised groups. More positively, electoral democracy functions by increasing the importance of the views different groups have of political leaders, and so encouraging them to take their interests into account. The connections between different political decisions and electoral outcomes are of course indirect, complex and mediated through whatever structures organize the electorate into groups that tend to act together. However, there are connections, and politicians have every interest in attending to them and the groups they empower. Electoral democracy is not perfect, but that does not mean it is anything less than a vital tool in the struggle to avoid state capture.

Avoiding state capture is then a powerful way of thinking about the shape and significance of democratic institutions, and The Dispersion of Power uses it to illuminate a wide range of questions. It is able to respond to criticisms of democratic institutions and show why, in spite of their failings, they remain important, while at the same time offering an account of how they might be extended or have tensions within them resolved. Not just the ambition is impressive, but also and more importantly the way it is put into practice, with detailed, thoughtful and persuasive discussions of topics as varied as the failures of consultative practices associated with New Deal-era regulatory agencies to the utopian horizon provided by a universal basic income (66ff, 147ff). For example, the chapter discussing the ‘distinctive set of practices’ Jane McAlevey calls ‘organizing for power’ opens what seems likely to be a crucial set of questions for anyone concerned to prevent the already-advantaged controlling public decision-making (214). Yet perhaps partly because of this ambition, some topics one might expect a book on democratic theory to cover are absent. For example, there is very little discussion of the design of electoral systems (275). What discussion there is of differences between different ways of electing officials focuses on how these questions typify the failings of trying to understand democracy through the lens of either responsive representation or participatory inclusion (e.g. 53). Considering how votes are aggregated to produce election results distracts from more important questions about how to avoid elites monopolizing public power and so, like other questions raised by the inadequate models of democracy The Dispersion of Power criticizes, are dismissed as irrelevant.

This is typical of the attention The Dispersion of Power gives to what Jeremy Waldron admitted were the ‘fuddy-duddy topics’ of constitutional law and structure when he sought to encourage political theorists to re-engage with questions of the institutions and practices that shape formal political life under the banner of what he called ‘political political theory’ (2016: 6). The Dispersion of Power treats those topics as basically epiphenomenal to the possibilities for and the likelihood of state capture, seeing the underlying distribution of power, and paradigmatically of material resources, as fundamental instead. And there is some reason to be suspicious of Waldron's focus on constitutional questions, which can abstract away from the political conflicts political practices and institutions actually have to manage (Jubb, 2024: 118ff, Bagg, 2018). Yet focusing only on how to equalize inequalities in the resources different groups bring to the political process can also obscure important topics.

For instance, even if we might expect that electoral systems themselves make little difference to the range of opportunities powerful groups have to suborn public decision-making, which is at least unclear (Carey and Hix, 2013), their effects on party formation may still be significant (Ferree et al., 2013). Partisan commitment to particular political parties is a central form of social identity, which seems to be particularly important for deeper forms of political engagement that The Dispersion of Power's calls for countervailing power require (Huddy et al., 2015). And partisanship in this sense seems to be significant in otherwise quite different party systems (Bankert et al., 2017). Even from the perspective of a focus on preventing the wealthy from dominating politics, there is some reason to engage with these more traditional topics of democratic theory. Nor is limiting the ability of the already advantaged the only normative and evaluative concerns political theorists might have about the way the political system structures political participation. Partisanship has tended to interest normative theorists primarily as a vehicle for achieving public justifications of the sort of associated with Rawls' political liberalism, which The Dispersion of Power would surely disparage as unhelpfully idealistic (Bonotti, 2017; Rawls, 2005; Rosenblum, 2008; White and Ypi, 2016). However, trying to work through the issues raised by attempting to pursue some kind of inclusive public good through democratic procedures does seem a reasonable topic of inquiry, even if it might not best be conceptualized in terms of public reason.

More generally, material interests are given at least some of their content and form by institutions which structure the range of options available to groups and individuals. Which political actors and coalitions can be mobilized to protect a broad range of interests, and how and when, depends on the constellation of interests in society, and where they overlap or conflict. Acting to prevent state capture by mobilizing to protect most people's interests needs to take into account the effects of formal institutions, including but not limited to electoral rules, on those interests. Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro's attacks on the USA's deliberately fragmented government may overstate the benefits that responsible parties would provide, but it does not seem implausible that at least some of the opportunities for capture in that system are created by its staggered electoral system and the lack of control parties exercise over representatives (2018: 95ff). Stronger parties might emerge from a more centralized political system, and could create coalitions in favour of more effective and inclusive policy making, removing at least some of the opportunities for state capture. And even if new opportunities would gradually emerge, there would have still been a period in which public policy was more reliably directed towards the public good. The Dispersion of Power has very little to say about these kinds of questions though, and in particular about whether the society it directs the most attention towards, the USA, is so unequal in part for the kinds of reasons that Rosenbluth and Shapiro suggest. Instead, it treats it as exemplary despite being unusually inegalitarian for a supposedly liberal democratic society.

Inequality is the central concern of The Dispersion of Power, and that focus may well explain some of its lack of interest in formal institutions which it rightly observes can serve to mask and legitimate it. The lens provided by the risk of domination by the extremely wealthy as well as other elite groups can be powerfully productive when it offers compelling new accounts of the importance of universal suffrage or some of the limits of traditional liberal prescriptions. Yet, as the way it passes over questions about electoral systems illustrates, it can also obscure or distort topics where the opportunities for domination by oligarchs of one sort or another are not the only or perhaps even the main issue. Few societies have politics which revolve only around divisions between the very rich and everyone else but are instead also structured by other cleavages. In the liberal democratic societies inhabited by most of The Dispersion of Power's likely readers, they may be primarily economic, like those between home-owners and renters or between the comfortably-off and the poor, but may also be mainly culturally or religious, or focused on questions of social or educational policy, or how the criminal justice system should function. For instance, concerns about the political programme that Donald Trump will pursue over the course of his second term as US president are not simply limited to his attempts to funnel public goods and funds towards the extremely wealthy. His programme also includes attacks on protections for marginalized groups which are troubling independently of whether they empower oligarchs.

How democratic institutions manage cleavages to distribute the benefits of rule reasonably widely matters, and may well be, as The Dispersion of Power claims, the best way of thinking about the extent to which they are democratic. Certainly, it is a crucial question when thinking about the value of democratic institutions, and a more helpful way of understanding that value than focusing on which individual rights can be derived from intrinsic values like freedom or equality. However, successfully distributing the benefits of rule reasonably widely will rarely mean only paying attention to the outsized power of the extremely wealthy. It will typically also involve thinking about how to manage the demands that might be made by other groups, who may also have the capacity to successfully mobilize to exert undue pressure on and power in political institutions. For instance, avoiding state capture in sectarian societies like Northern Ireland does not mean only constraining the very rich but also different religious groups. This, for instance, is one way of understanding some of the questions Jacob Levy means to address in, for example, his The Multiculturalism of Fear or through his discussion of the tensions between what he calls rationalism and pluralism (2000, 2014). Similarly, how successfully public goods and infrastructure are provided often depends on the division of authority between different administrative units and their vulnerability to particular local pressure. Focusing on the extremely wealthy and their ability to capture state institutions will not avoid all failures to protect and promote the public good. Other groups can also be a threat to it.

The refusal to consider barriers to the public good apart from those presented by wealthy elites limits the insight offered by The Dispersion of Power's account of democracy. It focuses its attention on a particular set of questions about material resources, including in ways that may lead it to ignore the way political institutions themselves shape material interests, and it tends to elide social and political cleavages other than those between the very rich and everyone else, leaving it with little to say about how they may be mobilized to direct state power away from the public good. A richer account of the public good, and the barriers to it, would make possible a richer account of both the challenges democratic institutions face and the appropriate responses to them – including, among other issues, the possible costs of attempts to limit the power of the very wealthy by, for example, relaxing rule of law requirements. State capture is a powerful lens through which to view democratic institutions and their successes and failures, as The Dispersion of Power skilfully and comprehensively demonstrates. It can illuminate many important topics in democratic theory, responding in persuasive and novel ways to old questions as well as offering new areas to explore. The full power of that lens may only be made available though by adopting a more varied account of the common good that state capture stymies, and of the interests that may mobilize against it.