A CONCEPTUAL AND HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL CAPTURE

The study of what amounts to political capture is, of course, nothing new. It has been usefully used to examine the exercise of state power in the United States. US political scientists and sociologists have long sought to pin down and define the issue of elite power and how it is exercised in a democracy. In his landmark book of 1961, Who Governs?, Robert Dahl (Dahl, 1961) begins with a disarmingly straightforward question: 'In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs?' Dahl seeks to answer this question with an examination into the political workings of a mid-sized New England city, New Haven, Connecticut. His response is one that upholds a pluralist vision of politics, rather than one of 'capture', in which political influence and agency was dispersed and the city was run not by a single unified elite but by politicians responsive to the political demands of their constituents. Political competition thus helps in keeping the majority at bay. Inequalities there certainly were in New Haven, both in economic terms and in political access, but the system of governance there in the early 1960s, Dahl thought, demonstrated a plurality of actors when analysed in terms of who makes decisions in different spheres of administration. The political system was therefore stable and conflicts were normally managed by skilful professionals without much involvement by the citizenry.

Dahl acknowledges that the question of who governs in an unequal society is one 'that has been asked, I imagine, wherever popular government has developed and intelligent citizens have reached the stage of critical self-consciousness concerning their society', going back to Plato and Aristotle, if not before. In more recent times than ancient Greece, the issue was put perhaps most forcefully by Marx and Engels for whom the state in a capitalist society operated in line with the needs of capitalism as a mode of production and was dominated by the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie. The development of capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe, and then in North America, thus brought into being a capitalist state. However, it created the social struggles and class consciousness that Marx considered would lead to a socialist outcome. His analysis, of course, was underpinned by the egregious levels of social inequality in nineteenth-century Europe to which Thomas Piketty alludes in his well-known book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014). Nowhere was that social polarisation as evident as in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, where society and politics were dominated by the ruling families of the so-called 'Gilded Age'.

Dahl's approach was, in no small way, intended as a critique of the radical American sociologist, C. Wright Mills, whose work in the 1950s (Mills, 1956) provided important insights as to how power worked within a seemingly democratic framework. Mills saw the power of 'ordinary men' increasingly circumscribed by what he called the 'power elite' which controlled the state in the United States. Major national power, he wrote, 'now resides in the economic, the political and the military domains' (p6), meaning the corporation, the centralised state and the military order. He saw the power of 'institutional orders' as having increased enormously over the first half of the twentieth century, with these tightly interlinked. Inequality, he argued, was intimately bound up in the evolution of corporate structures:

Wealth also is acquired and held in and through institutions. The pyramid of wealth cannot be understood merely in terms of the very rich; for the great inheriting families ... are now supplemented by the corporate institutions of modern society: every one of the very rich families has been and is closely connected – always legally and frequently managerially as well – with one of the multi-million dollar corporations. (pp9–10)

While distancing himself from what he called 'vulgar Marxists', Mills defined the power elite of the United States as 'those political, economic and military circles which act as an intricate set of overlapping cliques, share decisions having at least national consequences' (p18). He saw them as hierarchies with 'structural coincidences of commanding positions and interests' (p19). At the other end of the social spectrum he saw a mass-like society, politically 'impotent' and which had little resemblance to the sort of American society celebrated by De Tocqueville in which voluntary associations and classic publics hold the keys to power. Contrary to what Dahl would argue, the middle groups in society 'neither express such will as exists at the bottom, nor determine the decisions at the top' (pp28–29).

The existence of a ruling class notwithstanding, the pretensions of democratic governance in America were questioned further by William Domhoff (1996). Criticising Dahl's methods and conclusions and siding more with Mills, Domhoff saw the managers of large income-producing property as those who exercise real power in the United States. He took up cudgels against what he called 'state autonomy theorists', and the sociologist Theda Skocpol in particular, who stressed the relative independence of the federal government in the United States and the responsiveness of American politics to voter leverage and competition between political parties. Domhoff maintained that it is the ruling elite, primarily business leaders, which effectively controls decision making. He, however, is no neo-Marxist, and claimed that 'class domination theory' does not necessarily imply acceptance of notions of historical materialism, the labour theory of value or the pervasiveness of class conflict.

In an earlier work (1967), and unlike Dahl, Domhoff posited that the American 'upper class' is, in effect, the 'governing class' and that shifting political coalitions are dominated by it (p3). He viewed the American upper class as closely-knit by 'such institutions as stock ownership, trust funds, intermarriages, private schools, exclusive city clubs, exclusive summer resorts' etc., with well-honed methods of training and preparing new members (co-optation) (p4). The governing class was a social upper class which owned what he saw as a disproportionate amount of a country's yearly income and contributed a disproportionate number of its members to the controlling institutions and key decision-making groups. This class, he argued, does not rule alone or exercise all power, but exercises dominance over the main controlling institutions. It is this control that is important. Members of the upper class and senior executives control foundations, elite universities, think...