ABSTRACT
The previous chapter examined some individual-level implications of the informational-structural account of business political power. But if business power is defined as the ability to get policymakers to produce policy in line with business preferences, the results of these behavioural patterns need to be examined. If the informational view of business power is to claim empirical relevance and verisimilitude, it therefore has to be tested at the macro level and with respect to political outcomes. At this level, the informational-structural model would imply that concessions by policymakers to business interests are more likely in contexts where the economic and informational constraints on policymakers’ capacities are considerable, and vice versa. The theory of structural dominance,with its claim that policymakers in democratic capitalist societies depend on business’ co-operation for a healthy and expanding economy, is an integral part of the informationalstructural model. This implies a role for the economic evaluation of policymakers by citizens – the phenomenon of ‘economic voting’ – which is a core ingredient to both the theory of the structural dependence of the state on capital and the informational view of business political power. In the informational-structural model, the damage through economic voting that can be incurred by policymakers for picking a business-unfriendly policy features as the size of negative inducement effects. To the extent that structural constraints such as economic voting vary across political contexts, they should then function as correlates of policy outcomes. Positive finding in this regard would constitute evidence in support of both the theory of the structural dependence of the state on capital, and the informational account of business political power at the centre of the present study.
