Contributors to this panel share a common question: in democracies, how does public opinion constrain private interests, notably banks, in regulatory areas in which finance has strong political preferences? The regulatory capture literature has long claimed that private interests have a dominant position in this area, while more recent scholarship has drawn attention to the ability of public attention to transform the quiet politics of capture into a noisy political arena, in which business interests are not always successful in achieving their goals.

Scott James and Dimitris Christopoulos combine network analysis with process-tracing to examine the relative influence of banks and consumer groups in the post-crisis regulation of the UK financial system. Lisa Kastner looks at the influence of the same set of actors in financial regulation post-crisis in the European Union and the United States, while Nick Ziegler and John Wooley explore these issues in macroprudential and derivatives regulation in the US Dodd-Frank reform. Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee combine trends in public opinion with attention to interest group action in the area of executive pay regulation in the UK and the US. Elsa Massoc takes a more historical perspective, showing how French and American debates over a financial transaction tax at the beginning of the 20^th century reflected the same dynamic relationship between the power of finance and the potential balancing capacity of political salience that we observe at the beginning of the 21^st century.