How informal influence enters formal systems of power — and begins to override them

Oct 6, 2026 · @Ngarm

Abstract

Contaminated power leakage names a governance risk that ordinary corruption law often misses: people with no public office gain privileged access to those who hold it, and their informal influence gradually reshapes how official power is used. The route in may be fame, social-media reach, kinship, friendship, wealth or patronage. None of these is illegitimate on its own. The problem starts when access turns into leverage, leverage into dependency, and dependency into decisions that public rules can no longer explain.

This paper sharpens the concept, places it beside related ideas such as clientelism and state capture, and tests it against documented cases: Rasputin at the Romanov court, the Gupta family in South Africa, Jho Low and 1MDB in Malaysia, Cambodia's Oknha system, and the nationalist information war around the 2025 Cambodia–Thailand border conflict. It ends with a diagnostic checklist, measurable indicators and institutional safeguards.

Conceptual proposition. Contaminated power leakage occurs when influence originating outside a formal institution acquires privileged access to official authority and progressively alters, bypasses or overrides that institution's rules, accountability, professional judgment and standards of fairness — without the outsider ever holding the office or bearing its responsibility.

1. The central idea: holding power versus reaching it

Every state runs on two systems at once. The formal system is visible: law, offices, procedures, chains of command, procurement rules, courts and oversight bodies. Max Weber called its ideal form legal-rational authority — obedience owed to impersonal rules rather than to persons. The informal system is the web of kinship, friendship, money, reputation, loyalty and emotional appeal that surrounds every official.

Political scientists Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky (2004) showed that informal rules can complement, accommodate, compete with or substitute for formal ones. Contaminated power leakage describes the drift from the first two toward the last two: informal influence stops lubricating the formal system and starts replacing it.

The key distinction is between holding power and having access to power. A minister holds power; her brother-in-law, her largest donor or the influencer who fills her rallies may only have access. Once that access is predictable and consequential, the distinction becomes almost meaningless in practice. The outsider does not sign the order, but shapes what the order says — and, crucially, carries none of the legal or electoral accountability attached to the signature.

"Contaminated" is a deliberate word. Informal relationships are normal and often healthy. Contamination begins only when they change how formal power is exercised — when access is traded for money, loyalty, publicity, protection or mobilisation, and when the resulting decisions cannot be justified by public criteria.

2. Where the concept sits among related ideas

Contaminated power leakage is not a synonym for corruption. It names the process and channel through which outsiders acquire influence, and it covers cases that are lawful on paper. The table places it beside neighbouring concepts.

Concept	Who acts	Typical exchange	Legal status	Visibility
Lobbying	Registered interests	Information and argument for a hearing	Legal, often regulated	Usually disclosed
Patronage	Office-holder distributing jobs or favours	Posts or benefits for loyalty	Often legal	Partly visible
Clientelism	Patron and many clients	Goods or protection for votes and support	Grey zone	Diffuse
Corruption	Official and briber	Money for a specific act	Illegal	Hidden
State capture	Private group vs. the state	Rules rewritten to serve the group	Often illegal	Hidden until exposed
Contaminated power leakage	Outsider with no office + office-holder	Access for money, loyalty, publicity or mobilisation	Lawful to illegal	Often visible but unexamined

Two features make the concept distinct. First, the currency need not be money: fame, nationalist mobilisation and personal intimacy work just as well. Second, it is a stage concept. Leakage is often the early, still-deniable phase that, left unchecked, matures into clientelism or full state capture — as the South African case below shows.

3. Pathway one: fame, social media and manufactured mobilisation

The newest pathway converts attention into access. Influencers build credibility not through office or expertise but through an online persona and a sense of personal closeness with followers — what researchers call parasocial intimacy. Platforms then reward whatever provokes the strongest emotion, and in a border dispute that is usually anger, pride and fear.

The mechanism

An institution that wants public support invites popular figures in: briefings, front-line visits, exclusive footage, photo opportunities. It believes it is using them. But the exchange is two-way. The influencer gains credibility and content; the institution gains reach and a mobilised audience. Over time the institution starts to need that audience, and the influencer's incentives — clicks, income, outrage — begin to set the boundaries of what the institution can afford to say. Moderation becomes costly because it disappoints the crowd the institution helped build.

Case: the 2025 Cambodia–Thailand border conflict

The conflict is a near-laboratory example, and it should be read symmetrically.

• Escalation path. A Cambodian soldier was killed in a brief clash in disputed territory in late May 2025. Five days of fighting from 24 July killed 43 people and displaced around 300,000 before a truce. A US- and Malaysia-backed ceasefire was later suspended by Thailand after a landmine blast, and renewed fighting in December killed roughly 100 people over 20 days and displaced more than half a million before a new truce on 27 December 2025.

• Military-amplified mobilisation (Thai side). Analysts at ISEAS's Fulcrum describe the Royal Thai Army galvanising nationalist sentiment through social-media campaigns, relying on a "crowdsourced nationalism" of trending hashtags and coordinated messaging.

• State-aligned fabrication (Cambodian side). The same analysis found Cambodian state-aligned media and online influencers circulating manipulated content, including a fabricated video of a "Thai air raid" presented as an incursion repelled by Cambodian forces.

• Monetised hostility. The Diplomat profiled a Thai influencer who publicly boasted of his Facebook income from conflict content, while Cambodian influencers were accused of spreading fabricated stories to stoke outrage — a direct financial incentive to inflame.

• Effect on statecraft. ASEAN Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn said online nationalism and disinformation in both countries made substantive mediation harder, and nationalist memes kept circulating after the July ceasefire.

ISEAS researcher Surachanee Sriyai concludes that both state-linked and independent influencers became integral to how the conflict was presented, not peripheral to it. In the framework's terms, this is Stage 2 (recognition) moving into Stage 3 (dependency): institutions began to rely on informal amplifiers whose income and status depend on escalation.

What distinguishes legitimate from contaminated

A ministry briefing journalists and creators openly, on equal terms, is ordinary public communication. Leakage begins when access is selective, rewards loyalty to one narrative, is undisclosed (paid, sponsored or coordinated content not labelled as such), or when officials begin to calibrate policy to avoid the anger of their own amplifiers.

4. Pathway two: intimacy, kinship and loyalty

The oldest pathway is relational. Friends, relatives, confidants and long-standing associates reach decision-makers through doors that ordinary citizens never see, and no transaction is ever recorded. Relational leakage becomes dangerous when personal loyalty begins to compete with institutional duty.

Case: Rasputin and the Romanov court (1905–1916)

Grigori Rasputin held no state office. His access came from the Empress Alexandra's belief that he could ease the haemophilia of her son Alexei. When Nicholas II took personal command of the army in 1915 and left Alexandra to manage domestic affairs, Rasputin's advice reached appointments of ministers and church officials. The rapid turnover of ministers that followed — sometimes called "ministerial leapfrog" — weakened the government's competence on the eve of revolution. A small circle of nobles murdered him in December 1916, an act that itself shows how far informal power had displaced formal channels: they saw no institutional way to remove him.

Case: Choi Soon-sil and South Korea (2016–2017)

Choi Soon-sil, a decades-long confidante of President Park Geun-hye, held no government post and no security clearance. Investigators found she had received drafts of presidential speeches and state documents, and had used her proximity to the president to press major conglomerates into donating tens of billions of won to two foundations she controlled. Mass candlelight protests followed; the National Assembly impeached Park in December 2016, and the Constitutional Court removed her from office in March 2017. Choi was later sentenced to a long prison term. This is the framework's full arc: intimacy → access → override → exposure.

Case: personal diplomacy across the Thai–Cambodian border (2025)

The 2025 crisis also shows how relationships can short-circuit formal statecraft. On 15 June 2025, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra spoke by phone with Hun Sen — then Cambodia's Senate President and a long-time associate of her father, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra — outside normal diplomatic channels. In the recording, which Hun Sen's side leaked, she appeared overly familiar on a national-security matter and seemed to disparage a Thai army commander.

The fallout was institutional: the largest coalition partner quit, the Constitutional Court suspended her on 1 July, and on 29 August 2025 it removed her for breaching ethical standards. For the framework, the episode cuts both ways. It shows a family-level relationship being used as a channel of state business, and it shows that the same informal intimacy could be weaponised by leaking it. Personal channels feel efficient precisely because they bypass the checks — which is also why they are fragile and exploitable.

Warning signs of relational leakage

• A person with no office is present at, or briefed on, decisions they have no role in.

• Officials address an outsider's requests faster or more favourably than identical requests from strangers.

• Family members of leaders act as unofficial envoys, gatekeepers or brokers.

• Removing or contradicting the outsider is seen as a personal betrayal rather than a normal policy choice.

5. Pathway three: wealth, patronage and reciprocal self-interest

Wealth becomes a leakage channel when private resources buy privileged proximity to public authority. The loop is simple: money creates access, access creates influence, influence yields protection or opportunity, and those benefits generate more money. Wealth itself is not the problem; the conversion of wealth into a parallel channel of public decision-making is.

Case: Cambodia's Oknha system

The Oknha title shows how a patronage relationship can be formalised and still escape accountability. It is not evidence that any individual Oknha has acted improperly; it is evidence of a structure that makes leakage easy.

• A price for proximity. Since a 1994 decree, the title has been conferred on civilians who donate to the state; the threshold was $100,000 until a 2017 sub-decree raised it to $500,000. A royal decree in October 2024 set new rules on granting, managing and revoking the title.

• Rapid growth. Title-holders rose from about 20 in 2004 to more than 700 by 2014, according to The Cambodia Daily.

• Kinship overlap. Royal decrees in July 2023 granted Oknha titles to Hun Sen's sister, brother and brother-in-law, as well as to a leading tycoon's wife and 18-year-old son.

• Recurring controversy. Title-holders have repeatedly been linked to land disputes, illegal logging and claims of impunity; a government working group was set up to review how titles are granted and withdrawn.

The sharpest illustration: Chen Zhi and Prince Group. Chen Zhi, a China-born tycoon, received the higher neak oknha title in July 2020 and served as an adviser to both Hun Sen and Prime Minister Hun Manet. In October 2025 the US indicted him for allegedly running one of Asia's largest scam-centre networks, and the US and UK imposed sanctions. Cambodia revoked his citizenship in December 2025 and, in January 2026, arrested and extradited him to China. Prince Group denies the allegations. Whatever the courts conclude, the case shows each stage of the model: donation-backed honour (access), advisory status (recognition), years of protection despite foreign concern (dependency), and an eventual rupture driven by external pressure rather than domestic oversight.

Case: the Gupta family and South African state capture (c. 2010–2018)

The Gupta brothers held no public office. Their access came through business ties and close friendship with President Jacob Zuma, whose son worked for their companies. Testimony later documented by the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture described outsiders influencing cabinet appointments and directing contracts at state-owned enterprises such as Transnet and Eskom. In 2016 then-Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas said a Gupta brother had offered him the finance ministry. The Commission's reports (2022) concluded that the family had exploited its relationship with Zuma to capture parts of the state. South Africa's experience shows leakage completing its arc into full state capture.

Case: Jho Low and 1MDB (Malaysia, 2009–2015)

Financier Jho Low held no formal position at the state fund 1MDB, yet US prosecutors allege he was central to diverting roughly $4.5 billion from it. His access rested on proximity to the family of Prime Minister Najib Razak. Najib was convicted in 2020 in a linked case; Low remains a fugitive. The case is a textbook example of an outsider exercising de facto control over a public institution while carrying none of its legal responsibility.

6. From access to contamination: the five stages

Leakage usually unfolds in five stages, and the cases above can be placed along them.

five stages of contaminated power leakage, with cases

Stages 1–3 are usually deniable and often lawful, which is why they are rarely challenged. By Stage 4 the damage is real, and by Stage 5 the formal system is a façade. The practical lesson is that oversight must act at Stages 2 and 3 — when an outsider becomes indispensable — not wait for proof of an override.

7. Dual governance, psychology and the spectrum of contamination

When the invisible system outweighs the visible one

The deepest risk is not a single corrupt decision but institutional displacement. Offices, laws and procedures remain intact on paper while outcomes are set by relationships, obligations and access. Citizens then live under dual governance: a visible system that promises equal treatment and an invisible one that delivers it only to the connected. In South Africa the formal cabinet still met and in Malaysia 1MDB still had a board — yet in both, decisive power had moved elsewhere.

The moral cost is a change in the criteria of justice. Protection, opportunity and recognition stop depending on public rules and start depending on private connections. That is why leakage corrodes trust even when no law is broken.

Why it works on people

Institutions are made of people, and leakage exploits well-documented features of human behaviour:

• Reciprocity. Gifts and favours create a felt obligation to return them, even when small — the basis of most gift-limit rules for officials.

• Authority and status. Proximity to the famous or wealthy confers borrowed prestige that officials are reluctant to lose.

• In-group loyalty. Nationalist and kinship ties turn disagreement into betrayal, raising the social cost of saying no.

• Popularity pressure. Elected and appointed officials fear being on the wrong side of a mobilised crowd.

• Incrementalism. Each exception seems small; by the time the pattern is visible, refusing would expose everyone already compromised.

Written rules alone cannot hold against these pressures. Safeguards must make the right choice easy and the wrong one visible.

Contamination is a spectrum

Not every relationship is suspect. Governments must listen to citizens, business, civil society, media and experts. The useful question is not "Is there a relationship?" but "What happens to institutional judgment because of it?" Influence moves toward contamination as it becomes more exclusive, less disclosed, more reciprocal, more decisive and more routine.

Position on the spectrum	What it looks like
Healthy influence	Open consultation; equal access; reasons given in public terms
Privileged access	Some voices get faster or more personal hearings; still disclosed
Leverage	Access tied to money, loyalty or mobilisation; obligations unstated
Override	Procedures bypassed; outcomes unexplainable without the relationship
Normalised capture	Parallel channel is the real decision system; formal one is façade

8. Diagnostic framework and indicators

The single most useful test is a counterfactual: would the same decision have been made if the relationship did not exist? The questions below turn that test into a practical checklist, followed by indicators that researchers or oversight bodies can actually observe.

Diagnostic questions

1. Access. Who reaches the decision-maker, and who cannot? What created that access — office, expertise, fame, money, kinship or mobilisation?

2. Transparency. Is the relationship known to the public or to the relevant oversight body?

3. Benefit. Does the outsider receive anything unavailable through ordinary procedures — licences, land, contracts, protection, titles, information?

4. Dependency. Does the official rely on the outsider's money, popularity, loyalty or political support?

5. Procedure. Are normal rules bypassed, accelerated or selectively applied?

6. Justification. Can the official explain the decision using public criteria rather than personal obligation?

7. Institutional effect. Are professional bodies — courts, auditors, the military chain of command — becoming subordinate to informal actors?

8. Routinisation. Have exceptions become the normal way things are done?

Observable indicators

Pathway	Indicators to track	Possible data sources
Fame / social media	Influencers given privileged military or ministerial access; undisclosed coordination with official accounts; policy reversals following online campaigns	Platform transparency reports, official visitor logs, content analysis
Relationships / kinship	Relatives or confidants in advisory or envoy roles without appointment; unofficial channels used for state business	Gazette appointments, leaked records, investigative journalism
Wealth / patronage	Donations or honours followed by licences, land or contracts; title-holders facing reduced enforcement	Procurement records, land concessions, court outcomes, honours registers
All pathways	Ratio of exceptions to standard decisions; turnover of officials who resist; outcomes reversed only by external pressure	Audit reports, personnel data, foreign sanctions and court filings

The last row matters most in low-oversight settings. When domestic institutions act only after foreign sanctions, indictments or leaks — as with Chen Zhi in Cambodia or 1MDB in Malaysia — that is itself evidence that internal accountability had been displaced.

9. Consequences and safeguards

What leakage costs

• Unequal treatment. Connected citizens get outcomes that others cannot obtain through formal procedures.

• Hollowed institutions. Professional bodies lose the capacity, and the courage, to decide independently.

• Accountability gaps. Real influence is exercised by people who face no election, audit or prosecution for its use.

• Moral displacement. Loyalty to persons outranks duty to office.

• Policy distortion. Decisions track private incentives — a scam economy tolerated, a contract steered, a border policy hardened for applause.

• Conflict escalation. Influencers and patrons who profit from polarisation make compromise costly, as the 2025 Thai–Cambodian information war showed.

• Loss of public trust. Citizens conclude that connections matter more than rules, which feeds cynicism and, eventually, instability.

What reduces it

The goal is not to abolish informal relationships, which is impossible and undesirable, but to stop them becoming unaccountable channels of public power. Each safeguard below has working precedents.

Safeguard	What it does	Existing examples
Access registers	Records who meets senior officials and why	EU Transparency Register; Canada's Registry of Lobbyists
Gift and hospitality limits	Caps reciprocity at small, declared amounts	South Korea's Improper Solicitation and Graft Act ("Kim Young-ran Act", 2016)
Foreign-influence disclosure	Makes agents of foreign interests visible	US Foreign Agents Registration Act
Conflict-of-interest declarations	Forces officials to name ties before deciding	Asset and interest declarations in many civil-service codes
Independent anti-corruption bodies	Investigates preferential treatment without political permission	Singapore's CPIB; post-Zondo prosecution units in South Africa
Reasoned decisions	Requires public criteria for licences, land and contracts	Administrative-law duties to give reasons; open procurement portals
Labelled paid content	Separates sponsored or coordinated messaging from opinion	Platform "paid partnership" labels; election-ad libraries
Transparent honours	Publishes donations, criteria and revocations for state titles	A public register would apply this to titles such as Oknha
Protection for refusers	Shields officials who resist improper pressure	Whistleblower-protection laws
Digital and media literacy	Helps citizens distinguish popularity from expertise	School and public-broadcaster programmes

In conflict settings, one further measure matters: militaries and ministries should publish clear rules on engaging influencers, so that briefing creators does not slide into outsourcing propaganda to actors whose income depends on escalation.

10. Conclusion and research agenda

Contaminated power leakage describes how influence without office comes to steer power with office. Fame, social-media reach, intimacy, kinship, wealth and patronage can all open the door. The danger begins when access becomes leverage, leverage becomes dependency, and dependency overrides rules — and it completes itself when that override becomes normal.

The cases show the pattern is neither new nor regional. Rasputin and Choi Soon-sil reached power through intimacy; the Guptas, Jho Low and the alleged Prince Group network through money and proximity; nationalist influencers in the 2025 Thai–Cambodian conflict through attention that institutions chose to harness. In almost every case, correction came late, often from outside, and after serious damage.

The principle is simple: informal influence may inform public power, but it must not quietly replace it. A resilient institution lets relationships, wealth, fame and popularity open a conversation — never decide its outcome.

Directions for further research

• Build indicators that measure the degree of leakage across political, military, business and media networks.

• Compare fame-based influencer networks with wealth-based patronage networks: speed, durability and reversibility.

• Study how recommendation algorithms accelerate the conversion of attention into political access, especially during armed conflict.

• Trace whether leakage is a reliable early-warning signal of later state capture, using South Africa and Malaysia as reference cases.

• Apply the framework symmetrically to Cambodia and Thailand, mapping links between military institutions, political families, business patrons and online influencers on both sides.

Sources

• ISEAS Perspective 2025/82 — influencers and KOLs in the Thailand–Cambodia dispute

• Fulcrum — how the Thai–Cambodian clash became a cyber war

• The Diplomat — a Thai influencer profiting from the border conflict

• Asia News Network — ASEAN Secretary-General on online nationalism

• AP via OPB — Thai court removes Paetongtarn over Hun Sen call

• Khaleej Times — clashes reignite, July toll of 43 dead

• Vatican News — December 2025 truce after 20 days of fighting

• The Cambodia Daily — Oknha price rises to $500,000

• Kamnotra — Oknha titles for Hun Sen's relatives, 2023

• Open Development Cambodia — Royal decree on the Oknha title, 2024

• The Standard — Chen Zhi, Prince Group and the neak oknha title

• CamboJA News — Chen Zhi extradited to China

• Helmke, G. & Levitsky, S. (2004), "Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda", Perspectives on Politics 2(4).

• Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture (Zondo Commission), South Africa, Reports Parts I–VI (2022).

Rasputin, Choi Soon-sil, the Gupta and 1MDB summaries draw on well-established public record; verify specific figures against the primary reports before publication.

Contaminated Power Leakage: