Political Rigging: A Primer on Political Capture and Influence in the 21st Century

Janine Wedel, Nazia Hussain & Dana Archer Dolan, Oxfam America Research Backgrounder, 2017.

Who influences decisions that crucially affect the public—from the distribution of precious water or energy resources to health care to the regulation of exotic and potentially risky financial instruments? What factors shape whose say matters and who gets what? With economic inequality growing so dramatically in recent years, there is increasing scrutiny on the question of whether elite priorities have taken an outsized role in the policies that helped create this vast disparity. Studying how influence-wielding elites fashion rules of the game to favor the rich few, at the expense of the underprivileged many, is at once an intuitive but challenging and imperative task.