Elite capture[1] is a form of corruption whereby public resources are biased for the benefit of a few individuals of superior social status in detriment to the welfare of the larger population.
This causes a siphoning of resources by elite middlemen through legal practices such as noncompetitive tender of contracts, excessive pricing and overcharging, which reduce the proportion of a government project's budget being spent on the declared mission.
[3] On the other hand, theory predicts that when people are involved in governing and have representation in decision making, public spending is supposed to be more efficient, more equitable and more sustainable.
[5] Attempts to reduce elite capture in decentralized governments range from going back to a heavily centralized planner to providing citizens with funds to initiate projects.
Empirical studies have shown that government responsiveness and accountability to ensure equal distribution of public goods and avoid elite capture is related to the availability of information and general levels of awareness among the local population.
By raising public awareness of power inequalities and building local capacity, this approach suggests that community empowerment and political citizenship would be effective in resisting elite domination.
However, both phenomena are both symptomatic of and a main reason for bad governance because they promote a vicious cycle, with long-term effects on institutional and bureaucratic performance.
An example of elite capture in the United States is to be found in the literature on the subject of iron triangles, wherein special interests are able to achieve disproportionately favorable outcomes from congressional committees and federal regulators.
Oftentimes, personnel between each side of the iron triangle is interchangeable, a revolving door dynamic which is favorable to the development of capture of regulators by the entities they are supposed to oversee.
Additional examples are male-dominated cultures where women may be disproportionately influenced by elite capture, since they tend to be excluded from the social elect and public services.
It is a phenomenon that may even take place even where there is no clear indicators of ‘capture’ of power or corruption like access to education in rural areas of developing countries.
The concept itself is still in constant evolution because a majority of the evidence comes from non-experimental case studies or empirical data sets where there is very little consensus on the outcomes.