Scholarship on regulatory capture—when businesses lobby regulators to act contrary to the public interest—has thrived since the 1970s. Yet it ignores an important dimension of influence, what we call ideological capture. This occurs when experts design regulatory frameworks that marginalize important public values and produce favorable outcomes for special interests even in the absence of lobbying. We present a theoretical and empirical framework for understanding ideological capture, rooted in expert–public cleavages, and measure its presence in an important policy domain (antitrust review of business mergers) with an original survey of the public and of antitrust lawyers. Our results suggest that the main framework for evaluating anticompetitive conduct, the consumer welfare standard, marginalizes important public concerns but is deeply popular among antitrust lawyers. With prior work showing the standard arose not from conventional processes but from judicial and bureaucratic activism, we conclude that antitrust policy evidences ideological capture.

The power of economists in policymaking is widely recognized by both scholars and political actors. While the literature on expert influence has primarily focused on the intellectual features of expert arguments, we argue that economists’ strategic use of framing and normative reasoning wields more influence in policymaking than is acknowledged by current scholarship. Through a comprehensive investigation into the institutionalization of the Norwegian Oil Fund and its associated fiscal regime, drawing on 26 elite interviews with key political and technocratic actors, we unveil the considerable influence of state economists in shaping the policy for managing petroleum wealth. These economists not only played a crucial role in legitimizing and lending credibility to the new policy but also employed strategic framing as a reinforcing mechanism to sustain the policy regime, illustrating the essential role of economists as storytellers. Hence, we suggest including strategic framing as a conceptual element within the theoretical framework of expert influence.

While the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to ‘fail forwards’ by generating a crisis that would enable a statist kind of neoliberalism. The key ideas that they drew on and the policies that they used to put them into practice sought to transform the economy indirectly, through a set of performative policy devices that they believed would generate a dramatic shift in people's inflationary expectations, lowering inflation without provoking a major recession. Archival records make it clear that these efforts were not only a failure, but also one that policymakers were acutely aware of at the time. By examining these quiet failures in economic policy, we can better understand how these governments simultaneously failed in their early efforts to introduce neoliberal economics and yet ultimately succeeded in transforming their economies in important respects – and in legitimising those transformations by narrating failure as a kind of inevitable success.

New Zealand moved further in neo-liberal tax reform than most other advanced economies over the last three decades. The article investigates this extreme case to address the question of what explains major neo-liberal economic reform. Comparing tax policy-making in two periods, the 1980s and 2008–10, we argue that neo-liberal tax reform in New Zealand is best understood as the product of “autonomous bureaucratic action”. That is, bureaucratic organisations within the state independently formulated the goals and ideas for reform, took an activist role in policy-making and strongly influenced the policy preferences of ministers. Moreover, responding to a criticism often raised against state-centred theories, we offer an explicit explanation of bureaucratic preferences. We argue that bureaucratic goals and ideas were a product of how particular structural features of the bureaucracy – organisation and training – made ministries more or less receptive to new ideas within the economics discipline.