Networks of institutional capture: a case of business in the State apparatus
Résumé
In this chapter we describe and show the contribution of network anamysis in measuring the level of institutional capture in a specific case. We analyse a network of business people acting a lay judges in a judicial institution, the mai first level commercial court in France. This court handles commercial litigation as well as bankruptcies. Courts are not static institutions making atemporal and purely rational decisions. They are contested terrain, the object of broader conflicts that occur outside courthouses. We use a longitudinal study of advice networks among these 240 lay judges at the Commercial Court of Paris (CCP) – judges who are elected by their business community at the local chamber of commerce – to examine a few characteristics of such an institutional capture, in particular an invisible mechanism through which the banking industry manages to dominate this court. Results illustrate the value of network studies for a renewed attention to the inner workings of institutions and for the protection of public interest in the regulation of capitalist economies, in which boundaries between private and public sectors are blurred.