A Normative Approach to Exploring Political Settings for Constitution Capture

Although the body of literature on the phenomenon of state capture has been growing more prominent since 1999, some academics have still struggled to determine even the apparent manifestation of state-capture political settings at a definitional and operational level. The main reason for this is that they seem to have unwarrantedly confined to economic explanations, or Hellman and his colleagues’ original definition and conditions of exploring the phenomenon in which the outside business actors of the state with monetary interests are only recognized as the main active captors of the state, among other conditions. Therefore, it is theoretically necessary to develop an analytical framework for an understanding of state capture, which helps us examine how the inside political actors of the state can also involve themselves in capturing the state for their political interests. In discussing definitional and operational issues on the original and current understanding of the phenomenon, we attempt to identify some key factors and normative elements in the nurturing of such an analytical framework. It is reasonable to conclude that to enhance our ability to fully explore state-capture political settings in the established elements of a constitution or legislation, the occurrence of shaping ‘the formation of the basic rules of the game’ should conceptually and empirically be recognized as a typology of the phenomenon of state capture, namely ‘constitution capture’ while shifting our research focus from the activity-politics (the political life) of the state to the sphere-politics (the idea) of the state in a way that the locus of the phenomenon and its profound consequences are to be explained in terms of the sphere-politics.