Vested Interests and Political Institutions

Vested interests are part of the everyday language of political science. But they are not part of its theories, at least not in any explicit or systematic way. My argument here is that, particularly in our efforts to understand the stability and change of political institutions, vested interests are not only substantively important—which is why political scientists cannot help but talk about them—but also have great analytic value and provide an especially productive basis for theory.