Vested Interests and Political Institutions

VESTED INTERESTS ARE PARTOF THE EVERYDAY LANGUAGE of political science. But they are not part of its theories, at least not in any explicit or systematic way. My argument here is that, particularly in our efforts to understand the stability and change of political institutions, vested interests are not only substantively important—which is why political scientists cannot help but talk about them—but also have great analytic value and provide an especially productive basis for theory. If we think about political institutions in terms of the formal structures of government, including governmental programs and the structural arrangements surrounding them, a good place to begin is with a few simple but profound facts. Vested interests are present in every realm of public policy—in health care, defense, agriculture, transportation, international trade, you name it—in every part of the world. All institutions, across all policy arenas, everywhere, naturally and inevitably generate them, simply because certain people and groups reap benefits (often in very different ways) from what the institutions do. Vested interests then have strong incentives to protect those institutions when faced with threatening reforms—and in the politics of change, therefore, they have the potential to be powerful forces for stability. This is a universal phenomenon that, when built into our theories, stands to tell us a great deal about the political