If Somebody Tells You Agency Capture Isn't a Real Thing
A standing page for Anatomy of a Captured City — how developer bias captured Shorewood City Hall. This is a bibliography of key research on this topic.
Maybe you wonder if this agency capture is a real thing. Or maybe somebody told you that agency capture is something we made up to explain losing.
It isn't. It has been studied for seventy years, it is taught in every public policy program in the country, and one of the economists who worked on it won a Nobel Prize. Here are five places it comes from. You don't have to read any of them. It's enough to know they exist.
George Stigler, "The Theory of Economic Regulation" (1971). The paper that put the idea in the mainstream. Stigler's point was blunt: as a rule, an industry ends up with the regulation it wants, because it is the one party that shows up every single time with something at stake. Stigler won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1982. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, vol. 2, p. 3.
Marver Bernstein, Regulating Business by Independent Commission (1955). The first full account. Bernstein described regulators aging through a life cycle that ends with the agency protecting the industry it was created to police. Nobody thought this was a radical idea in 1955 and nobody thinks so now. Princeton University Press.
William Fischel, The Homevoter Hypothesis (2001). This one is about suburbs. How local land-use decisions actually get made, and whose interests they end up tracking. If you want the version of this that is about cities and houses instead of airlines and banks, start here. Harvard University Press.
Robert Ellickson, "Suburban Growth Controls" (1977). A law review article on how zoning works in practice in places like Shorewood, and who tends to win when it does. Yale Law Journal, vol. 86, p. 385.
Daniel Carpenter and David Moss, editors, Preventing Regulatory Capture (2014). A whole book, by economists and political scientists and lawyers, on how capture happens without anybody taking a bribe — and on what actually prevents it. The two changes we're asking the City Council for come straight out of this literature. Neither one is original to us. Cambridge University Press.
One thing worth noticing about all of it. Not a single one of these describes a conspiracy, and not one of them is about corruption. They describe something duller and harder to fix: a regulator that hears from one side constantly and from the other side almost never, and drifts.
And they agree on the conclusion. Capture is the default. It is what happens unless somebody deliberately builds something to stop it.
That's the whole reason we're asking for two boring rules instead of asking anybody to resign.
A longer annotated list, with eleven sources, went to the Shorewood City Council. We're happy to send it to anyone who wants it.
Anatomy of a Captured City
How developer bias captured Shorewood City Hall.
Public watchdog or developer lapdog? Capture and Why You Pay — The name for what happens when a regulator starts seeing things the way the people it regulates do.
The Amazing Shrinking Environmental Review — An environmental review ordered in February covered one lot by September. Nobody voted. A chronology from the City's own records.
Eleven Tools, Not One Used - a Tree Preservation Policy that Doesn't Preserve Trees — The City's tree policy gave it eleven powers over how these woods come down. There is no record it used one of them.
One and a Half Percent, a Story of a Flood Foretold — The stormwater report left only a 1.5% margin on the largest storm, uphill of homes that have already flooded, without the City's file showing that the assumptions were checked.
Letting the Clock Run Out — The City is defending its own decision on appeal. Read what its brief leaves out.
How It Happens, and What to Do About It — Why this happens to normal people, and the two small things we're asking the City Council to do.
Related posts
Read this with the related posts:
Series overview · What Capture Is, and Why You Pay · The Amazing Shrinking Environmental Review · Eleven Tools, Not One Used - a Tree Preservation Policy that Doesn't Preserve Trees · One and a Half Percent, a Story of a Flood Foretold · Letting the Clock Run Out · How It Happens, and What to Do About It · A Eulogy for Arthur
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