Defending Democracy: Resisting State Capture From Above and Below
Thursday, September 3, 8:00 am to 9:30 am
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA | Register here
In-Person | Full Paper Panel
Participants:
- (Chair) Elizabeth David-Barrett, University of Sussex
Session Description:
Growing concern about state capture has intensified over the past decade, driven both by its corrosive effects on governance and by the deeper threat it poses to democratic institutions. Empirically, state capture has been correlated with escalating corruption, deteriorating service delivery, and growing fiscal strain, with cases from South Africa to Hungary as well as Russia and the United States illustrating how politically connected networks can distort public expenditure, weaken procurement systems, and undermine economic management. At the same time, research on pathways of autocratization demonstrates that state capture is also a critical driver of the hollowing out of democracy: by subverting checks and balances, disabling oversight bodies, and centralising authority in informal networks, capture accelerates the pathways of autocratisation documented in recent work on democratic backsliding (Cheeseman et al 2024; Dávid-Barrett, 2023; Chipkin 2018). The result is a dual governance and democratic crisis in which citizens struggle to hold leaders to account, public trust declines, and opportunities for renewal narrow.
These developments have generated important new questions for both scholars and practitioners. How can citizens, civil society organisations, and international actors work effectively to constrain or reverse state capture once it has taken hold? Why do some institutions display surprising resilience, while others succumb quickly to outside pressure? And, in an increasingly authoritarian global environment, do international efforts to limit state capture – whether through conditionality, technical support, or rule-of-law mechanisms – still have meaningful influence? Over the past ten years, a vibrant body of innovative research has emerged to address these challenges, drawing on comparative political economy, public administration, and the study of social norms. This panel brings together four papers that collectively provide a rich perspective on the dynamics of state capture and the prospects for effective reform because they address this issue both “from above” and “from below”.
Taking a bottom-up approach, Cheeseman and Peiffer present experimental evidence from South Africa on how citizens understand state capture and how anti-capture messaging shapes public attitudes, civic engagement, and trust in democratic institutions. Their paper highlights the unintended consequences of conventional anti-corruption narratives and offers insights into how communication strategies might be redesigned to mobilise rather than demobilise citizens. Meanwhile, Frederick Adu-Gyamfi introduces the Democracy Capture Index developed by CDD-Ghana, presenting comparative data for the first ten African countries to be assessed. This new measure sheds light on sectoral patterns of capture, institutional vulnerabilities, and the specific pathways through which democratic checks are eroded.
Complementing this, Jozsef Péter Martin examines the European Union’s evolving approach to safeguarding the rule of law in Hungary as elections approach which represent a potential opportunity to halt state capture. The research analyses the interaction between external pressure and public accountability within a member state sliding into competitive authoritarianism and provides a critical vantage point on the capacity and legitimacy of external actors seeking to curb capture from above. Similarly, Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett and Tom Shipley contribute a systematic assessment of the IMF’s emerging governance diagnostics and revised anti-corruption framework, evaluating how far these tools confront the structural features of state capture and whether they can meaningfully alter incentives within captured or partially captured states.
Together, these papers offer a timely and multidimensional analysis of one of the most pressing governance challenges of our time, integrating perspectives from citizens, national institutions, and international organisations to improve our understanding of how state capture emerges – and how it might be reversed.
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