The March 10, 2014, seminar presentation was led by Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow, Dieter Zinnbauer. A Program Manager for the International Secretariat of Transparency International in Berlin, Zinnbauer works on emerging policy issues and innovation. Prior to his current assignment, Zinnbauer served as the Chief Editor of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Report. During his fellowship year, Zinnbauer has focused his research on exploring possibilities to empirically identify and track elements and risks of policy capture. Zinnbauer’s presentation, titled: “Capturing Policy Capture?” addressed the challenges Transparency International’s has encountered in working to conceptualize, develop, and implement methods to measure and track policy capture.
Zinnbauer began the Lab seminar by giving an overview of the organizational structure, guiding principles, and research activities of Transparency International. He spoke about some of Transparency International’s advocacy activities and signature tools, such as the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), a meta index that measures perceptions of public sector corruption.
Often referenced in press releases, Zinnbauer explained that the CPI is confined to expert perceptions of corruptions, and does not speak to any detailed changes at policy level. For a more in-depth examination of country diagnostics, Zinnbauer pointed to the National Integrity System Studies, which assess integrity systems in countries. In short, these studies look at large sets of institutions that contribute to integrity in countries, examining weaknesses in institutional design, resource allocation, and institutional effectiveness.
Moving on to the primary topic of the presentation, Zinnbauer explained that unlike the street-level types of corruption that Transparency International currently measures, identifying policy capture presents a larger challenge. For in order to track this more elusive and systemic type of corruption, a clear conceptualization of what constitutes policy capture must be developed. In doing so, organizations and researchers could then work to identify and measure variation of the problem across units, such as countries or specific institutions. Participants of the seminar seemed to agree that this type of corruption generally occurs when private interest groups exert influence on policymakers to seek favorable regulatory outcomes. This in turn led to a brief discussion on contemporary empirical research efforts examining revolving door issues and returns on investment in corporate lobbying. Zinnbauer seemed hopeful that these evolving research efforts would increase transparency on certain aspects of regulatory capture. Still, the conversation shifted back to identifying a methodology to conceptualize policy capture. Zinnbauer explained that one way of identifying red flags for and measuring the likelihood of policy capture might be to look at the policy-outcomes side and focus on issues such as inequalities or deteriorating social mobility. However, some participants resisted this outcome-based approach, instead favoring a process-based methodology, where architecture of policymaking free of improper dependencies is first identified in order to set a baseline for this type of corruption.
Finally, Zinnbauer closed the seminar by discussing possible promising avenues for exploration to find methodologies that might help measure some central aspects of policy capture. Interestingly, he suggested several ways in which organizations might utilize data mining methods to shed light on relationships at the nexus of business and government. Specifically, mining social networks such as Linkedin might reveal conflicting relationships between regulators and corporate stakeholders. One participant of the Lab seemed skeptical of this approach, arguing that it would be hard to tease out improper dependencies from these facile relationships, but there was some agreement that with a more targeted methodological approach, that this type of data mining might yield interesting results. In summary, notions of regulatory capture were discussed at length, and tactics for identifying and measuring the problem were explored. The Lab seminar provided intriguing insight into how researchers and organizations could potentially organize and collaborate to bring about more transparency to the policymaking discourse.
-Summary composed by Joseph Hollow