The revolving door between government and the industries government regulates is the institutional mechanism that converts regulatory authority into industry advantage.
The Mechanism
The revolving door — the movement of personnel between government regulatory positions and the industries they regulate — operates in both directions with different mechanisms and different governance consequences. The industry executive who moves into a government regulatory position brings industry knowledge and relationships that can be valuable for regulatory effectiveness and that create the conflict-of-interest risks that post-employment restrictions are designed to manage. The government regulator who moves into an industry position brings regulatory knowledge, government relationships, and institutional access that are directly valuable to the industry employer — and whose value creates the incentive structure that shapes regulatory decision-making during the regulator's government tenure.
The anticipatory mechanism is the most consequential dimension of the revolving door for regulatory governance: the regulator who expects to seek industry employment after government service has incentives — not necessarily corrupt, but structural — to make regulatory decisions that maintain good relationships with the industries they will eventually approach for employment. The prospective employer values the regulatory relationships and the institutional access that the regulator can provide; the regulator values the career prospects that the industry employment represents. These incentives are structural rather than individual — they operate across regulatory agencies regardless of the specific integrity of individual regulators, because they shape what decisions are made in the regulatory environment before the individual regulator has made any specific corrupt choice.
The revolving door is the institutionalisation of the anticipatory conflict of interest in regulatory governance. The regulator who plans to join the regulated industry after government service is not necessarily corrupt — they may make every specific decision with complete integrity. But the structural incentive that the revolving door creates shapes the regulatory environment in ways that individual integrity cannot fully neutralise. Managing it requires structural constraints, not just ethical commitments.
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