Rent Seeking in Succession
From Succession (HBO)
Categories:
Run time: 7:55
Clip Description: Effort is spent not on making anything but on capturing a share of what already exists – positioning, lobbying and manoeuvring for a transfer rather than for a product.
Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for rent seeking, which in comparative politics explains why resources flow into influence rather than production, and why some states generate growth while others generate only competition over existing wealth. It connects directly to the resource curse, to regulatory capture, and to corruption as an equilibrium rather than a moral failing.
Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this in a political economy unit alongside a case of natural-resource wealth. The clip makes the abstract point concrete – that the returns to seeking a transfer can exceed the returns to producing anything – and the resource case then shows what happens when a whole state is organized that way.
Discussion Questions
- Rent seeking is competition for a transfer rather than for the creation of anything new; the classic instances are lobbying for a license, a tariff, or an exclusive contract. Identify what is being competed for in this scene and who loses if the competitor wins. Then say why Gordon Tullock thought the competition itself, and not merely the transfer, was the real social cost.
- Rents require a barrier — a regulation, a license, a natural monopoly, a political relationship. Which kind is doing the work here, and how portable is it? A rent protected by a personal relationship and a rent protected by statute behave very differently the moment the personnel change, which is worth spelling out.
- Comparativists use rent seeking to explain why some well-resourced states stay poor. But every state creates rents; the question is whether they are contestable and whether the winners are compelled to invest rather than simply to collect. What distinguishes a system in which rent seeking is a drag from one in which it is fatal?
Assignment
The V-Dem project codes several distinct forms of corruption separately — executive bribery, legislative corruption, public sector theft, and regime favoritism in the allocation of contracts. Pick two countries with similar overall corruption scores and disaggregate them. In two pages, show where the similar headline number conceals quite different underlying patterns, and say what each pattern implies about where the rents sit and who collects them. The hard part is the last step: a country whose corruption is concentrated in procurement and one whose corruption is concentrated in petty bribery need completely different reforms, and the headline index will never tell you which one you are looking at.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.