Specialized parliamentary intelligence oversight committees are one of the classic forms of intelligence oversight, yet they are frequently regarded as inadequate. Many reasons have been proposed, such as a claim that legislators neglect oversight because of lack of sustained electoral pressure or that political alignment between the executive and the legislative majority dampens the oversight zeal. We propose to develop another hypothesis – one of regulatory capture. Oversight committee members, drawn into the secret world of intelligence and dealing regularly with its concerns, adopt the perspective of the agencies they are supposed to oversee. We expect that all three conditions resulting from regulatory capture will exist in this case: first: asymmetric interest; second; information asymmetry, and third: the identification mechanism. In the present analysis, we focus on the Polish case as a proof of concept, although the method described can be applied to any country.
KBN Analysis No. 7 (122) / 2023
8 May 2023
Specialized parliamentary intelligence oversight committees are one of the classic forms of intelligence oversight, yet they are frequently regarded as inadequate. Many reasons have been proposed, such as a claim that legislators neglect oversight because of lack of sustained electoral pressure or that political alignment between the executive and the legislative majority dampens the oversight zeal. We propose to develop another hypothesis – one of regulatory capture. Oversight committee members, drawn into the secret world of intelligence and dealing regularly with its concerns, adopt the perspective of the agencies they are supposed to oversee. We expect that all three conditions resulting from regulatory capture will exist in this case: first: asymmetric interest; second; information asymmetry, and third: the identification mechanism. In the present analysis, we focus on the Polish case as a proof of concept, although the method described can be applied to any country.
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