Re-evaluating Regulatory Capture: The Limits of Industry Influence in Pharmaceutical and Consumer Financial Regulation

监管已成为政府维护公共利益的日益重要的工具。随着公共服务私有化，政府出台了监管措施，以确保通过私营公司实现公共目标。此外，随着消费品的风险越来越为人所知，例如食品和药品带来的健康风险，各国政府越来越多地监管市场，以确保消费者的安全。因此，我们看到，由专家组成、独立于政府其他部门运作的监管机构大幅增加。因此，专家机构正在作出许多对社会有直接影响的决定。然而，监管机构经常被指责存在一种被称为“监管俘获”的现象。一种观点认为，私营企业的利益过度影响了政府的监管，从而转移了政府为公共利益工作的能力。关于这一主题的学术研究一直被植根于所谓的“公共选择”和“委托代理”理论的理论描述所主导。这些都基于这样一种假设，即政府监管官员天生就容易被抓，因为他们有很多动机来逃避民选领导人赋予他们的责任。例如，按照这种思路，人们经常辩称，监管官员希望偏袒他们本应监管的企业，因为这有助于他们在离开政府工作后，在私营部门找到有利可图的工作。这一理论工作得到了主要定量实证工作的补充，尤其是在美国的背景下，这些工作表明，政府监管机构做出的决定与受监管企业的假定利益之间存在相关性。这一项目揭示了这一学术理论，并表明监管俘获可能远没有人们通常认为的那么常见。它表明，现有文献没有充分考虑到关于监管官员实际行为的学术研究：这些文献表明，公职人员通常对其工作的社会价值有强烈的信念，他们所属的专业团体为他们提供了抗拒逮捕的弹性规范和激励。例如，为政府监管机构工作的科学家有强烈的动机遵循好的科学工作原则，以保持他们在同事中的声誉。该项目的主要目标是证明，监管捕获并非不可避免，并提供对监管官员的专业精神在哪些条件下充当抵御捕获的堡垒的迄今尚不清楚的理解。为了避免将任何看似符合行业利益的监管决策等同于捕获的倾向，该研究项目建议，我们需要将捕获定义为导致监管决策从公共利益转向特殊利益的行业影响力。从这一点来看，研究捕获需要使用定性的过程跟踪分析，与现有的关于监管捕获的定量研究相比，这种分析特别适合于确定因果关系。在捕获理论中，这一点一直被忽视，因为它主要展示行业利益和监管决策之间的相关性，而不是因果关系。该项目通过比较跟踪普遍认为容易被捕获的两个监管领域的监管决策过程来测试其新的捕获理论：英国40年(从1970年至2010年)的药品市场审批和金融产品消费者保护。

Regulation has become an increasingly important tool of government for safeguarding the public interest. As public services have become privatised, government regulation has been introduced to ensure that public goals are realised through private companies. Moreover, as risks from consumer goods have become more well-known, such as health risks arising from foods and medicines, governments have increasingly regulated markets to ensure consumer safety. As a consequence, we have seen a large increase in regulatory agencies that are staffed by experts and that operate independently from the rest of government. Expert institutions are thus taking many decisions that have a direct bearing on society. However, regulatory agencies are often accused of a phenomenon called 'regulatory capture'. Capture is the idea that private business interests excessively influence government regulation thereby diverting the ability of government to work in the public interest. Scholarship on the subject has been dominated by theoretical accounts that are rooted in so-called 'public choice' and 'principal-agent' theories. These are underpinned by the assumption that government regulatory officials are inherently prone to being captured since they have many incentives to shirk from the responsibilities given to them by elected leaders. For example, in this line of thought it is often argued that regulatory officials want to favour the businesses they are meant to regulate because this helps them to get lucrative jobs in the private sector after leaving their government job. This theoretical work has been complemented by mainly quantitative empirical work, especially in the US context, that shows that there are correlations between the decisions taken by government regulators and the presumed interests of regulated businesses.This project shines a critical light on this scholarship and suggests that regulatory capture may be far less common than often assumed. It suggests that existing literature has insufficiently taken into account scholarship on the actual behaviour of regulatory officials: this literature has demonstrated that public officials usually have a strong belief in the societal value of their work and that their belonging to a professional group provides them with resilient norms and incentives to resist capture. For example, scientists working for a government regulator have strong incentives to follow principles of good scientific work in order to maintain their reputation among colleagues. The main objective of the project is to demonstrate that regulatory capture is not inevitable, and to provide a hitherto missing understanding about the conditions under which the professionalism of regulatory officials acts as bulwark against capture. To avoid the tendency to equate any regulatory decision that appears congruent with industry interests with capture, this research project suggests that we need to define capture as industry influence that results in the shifting of regulatory decisions away from the public interest towards special interests. In this light, studying capture requires the use of qualitative process-tracing analysis that, in contrast to existing quantitative research on regulatory capture, is uniquely suited to the identification of causation. This has been neglected in capture scholarship that mainly demonstrates correlations, not causation between industry interests and regulatory decisions. The project tests its novel theory of capture by comparatively tracing regulatory decision-making processes in two fields of regulation that are widely assumed to be vulnerable to capture: pharmaceutical market approvals and financial product consumer protection over four decades (from 1970 to 2010) in the United Kingdom.