This article introduces “epistemic business power” as a distinct facet of corporate influence. Epistemic business power refers to the strategic communication of firms to influence the perceptions and beliefs of policymakers, experts, media, and the public regarding which issues, goals, norms, methods, and instruments to be politically considered. Rather than influencing decision-making and policy formulation directly, this form of power enables firms to intermediate the anticipatory dynamics of structural forms of business power and shape issue salience as well as the definition and recognition of topics as political problems. The article explores the scope conditions of epistemic business power, detailing the interaction of material aspects, corporate communication and issue salience dynamics. Based on quantitative and qualitative content as well as reception analyses, ownership data and interviews, a case study of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock illustrates how today’s finance capital can use epistemic channels with regard to fundamental questions about the role of state capacity and private enterprise in capitalist democracies. By foregrounding the political nature of corporate public relations, the conceptual endeavor and its empirical illustration contribute to a deeper understanding of corporate power and its multifaceted role in shaping politics in capitalist democracies.

The current conflictual dynamics underlying high-tech rivalry between China and the United States and the management of collateral damages by middle-power countries emanate from the clashes of techno-statecraft. Each country’s pursuit of technological superiority for its own prosperity, security, and prestige through deep and wide state intervention has aggravated the situation. Against this backdrop, our paper attempts to elucidate the dynamics of techno-statecraft of China, the United States, and South Korea. First, we examined the concept of techno-statecraft, which can be differentiated from that of economic statecraft, as an analytical framework of the paper. Second, we looked into China’s technological challenge as shaped by its techno-statecraft. Third, we traced the American threat perception of China’s technological rise and its techno-statecraft response. Fourth, the paper discussed the dilemmas Asian countries are currently facing and their choices through a case study of South Korea. Finally, it draws some theoretical, empirical, and policy implications.

Stark wealth inequality is consequential for politics, yet the underlying mechanisms are still understudied. We join recent research urging a deeper analysis of how oligarchic interests and material power operate in highly unequal societies by expanding the business power literature to understand new sources of influence based on wealth. We engage in a concept-building exercise for the concept of business power and clarify the similarities and differences between material power and other sources of business power. We then discuss different mechanisms underlying material power and develop the mechanism of opportunity hoarding from the literature on social closure. Opportunity hoarding helps understand how oligarchic interests appropriate well-functioning state institutions for their benefit. We illustrate these mechanisms by analyzing the case of Guatemala, a country with tremendous wealth inequality and pervasive political instability. We highlight the usefulness of our proposed concept structure for analyzing diverse instances of business power and the concept of material power for understanding business influence in highly unequal societies.

Business actors play increasingly important roles in global governance and international regulation. This paper considers how regime complexity influences the roles of businesses and impacts opportunities for business influence on international regulatory regimes. We conducted a scoping literature review of 243 articles from the International Regime Complexity (IRC) theory literature to explore if and how complexity affects the roles of businesses and their influence on international regulation. We found that complexity presents opportunities for businesses to regime shift and exploit knowledge asymmetry in order to influence international regulation. Further, IRC theory illustrates how the roles of businesses interact and leverage one another in order to create better opportunities for influence in specific international regulatory regimes. This paper contributes to IRC theory by building on the existing non-state actor discussions and offering specific theorization of business behavior, thus starting to bridge the gap between the empirical and theoretical understanding. Second, it contributes to existing discussions in business and politics literature by developing existing knowledge on the roles of businesses in global governance to better reflect the added dimension of complexity.

Policy specialization in the U.S. Congress benefits the institution collectively and members individually. Yet members of Congress (MCs) are insufficiently specialized to optimize lawmaking success (Volden and Wiseman 2020). In this paper, we demonstrate the increasing propensity of MCs to generalize legislatively is driven largely by an expansion of MC legislative agendas in business domains. We then offer and test an explanation for this trend whereby business’s increasing demand for congressional attention (Drutman 2015) has outpaced the supply of congressional capacity to serve business needs (Crossen, Furnas, LaPira, and Burgat 2020; McKay 2022). This unmet demand incentivizes MCs to expand their business portfolio, which results in increased campaign contributions from business political action committees (PACs). We provide evidence consistent with this theory, showing that under conditions of access scarcity, MCs benefit financially (in terms of increased business PAC contributions) by broadening the number of business domains they are active in legislatively.

The theory of quiet politics has two propositions; first, that business interests prefer to engage with governments in ‘quiet’ arenas shielded from the media and the day-to-day political fray, and second that business interests exert power over governments in quiet politics. We counter the second proposition, arguing that business generally exercises influence rather than power in quiet politics. One precondition for the successful exercise of influence is the acceptance by business of certain protocols of behavior in interactions with governments. In this paper we underline the importance of such protocols by exploring the dynamics of a conflict between the east coast gas industry and the federal government in Australia amidst steep rises in domestic gas prices and supply restrictions in 2022. The gas industry behaved badly in the economy and in politics and did not abide by the relevant protocols of engagement with the government. The government responded aggressively and quiet politics failed. The paper underlines the importance of the behavioral pre-conditions for business influence in quiet politics and what can go wrong if this fails.

Recent controversies over “woke” businesses have challenged traditional partisan political alignments, leading to increased criticism on the right of corporate political activity. This paper explores how the public evaluates corporate political activity, focusing specifically on whether individuals believe corporations are doing too much (or too little) to advance social and political goals. We are especially interested in how social identities and pocketbook considerations shape perceptions of corporate political activities not explicitly tied to social issues. Does racial resentment, for example, influence perceptions of corporate political activity designed to increase worker wages or improve health care? Or are the effects limited to efforts to achieve racial equality? We find that racial resentment and hostile sexism have spillover effects, affecting perceptions of corporate political activity across issue areas. Partisan affiliation, political ideology, and personal pocketbook considerations, in contrast, play a more limited role. Previous research has demonstrated the effect of racial resentment and sexism on support for welfare policies. We add to this literature by showing that racist and sexist opposition extends to corporate political activities that might not be explicitly identified as socially progressive.

Digital governance is a public concern, yet under private control. After numerous scandals, all stakeholders in the European Union (EU) agreed to establish a “novel constitution for the internet” that would effectively constrain the power of large platforms. Yet the Digital Services Act (DSA) ultimately legitimized and institutionalized their position as the gatekeepers of the internet. Why? We argue that platforms prevailed thanks to their ability as intermediaries to quietly shape the available policy options. Our “platform power mechanism” combines institutional and ideational sources of business power to show how big tech drew on its entrenched position as an indispensable provider of essential services and promulgated the idea of itself as a responsible and neutral intermediary. We follow the unfolding of platform power through a process-tracing analysis of Google and Meta’s activities with respect to DSA legislation from its announcement (2020) to its adoption (2022). Besides contributing a reconceptualization of the DSA as a regulatory capture, we integrate the notion of platform power into a “regulator–intermediary–target” model and demonstrate how gatekeepers have exploited information asymmetries to share “the public space.” Our analysis thus supplements established approaches that have derived regulators’ deference to platforms from the tacit allegiance of consumers.

Research has shown that the relationship between economic freedom and corruption is rather complex. While some studies suggest a negative relationship, others show the matter to be more nuanced. While more regulations are known to foster corrupt institutions, a competitive market can also incentivize bribery and corruption. Our study examines the role of economic freedom as it relates to perceived corruption, measured via a survey for India. Using firm-level data, we explore the relationship between perceived corruption in the formal sector and economic freedom across Indian states. In our baseline results for Indian firms, we find a significantly negative relationship between perceived corruption and lagged economic freedom. These results hold when we design matching models and include a number of potentially confounding factors to control for identification issues. Additionally, we show that small and young firms and those with sole ownership perceive greater benefits from higher economic freedom. In contrast, older firms perceive higher corruption when economic freedom is higher. This lends support to the idea that competition facilitated by economic freedom can increase rent seeking behavior. Our study contributes to the literature by emphasizing that the relationship between economic freedom and corruption in India is layered, with firm characteristics playing a crucial role.

This study analyzes direct lobbying in the Chilean Congress, contributing to the debate over which legislators are targeted by interest groups. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset constructed from legally mandated records of lobbying meetings, we test theoretical implications predominantly derived from the US context within a different presidential democracy. The focus is on the legislative targets of business and labor groups. The results reveal a marked preference for lobbying allies, aligning with recent theories of information transmission and legislative subsidies. This pattern holds true for both business and labor groups and highlights the significance of ideological alignment for legislative lobbying in Chile. Additionally, the study finds that legislators with influential positions, such as those on key committees or centrally located in the bill collaboration network, are more frequently targeted. This research provides key insights into the dynamics of legislative lobbying in a non-US context, underscoring the generalizability of established theoretical frameworks.

State-sponsored cyber attacks are increasingly attracting attention in the literature, with many analysts interested in the firm-level economic implications of these attacks. Nevertheless, the bulk of these studies focus on firms directly targeted in the attacks. In this paper, I examine the broader, often overlooked ripple effects of these attacks on third-party entities like cybersecurity service providers who are frequently at the frontlines of dealing with these attacks. Leveraging data on cyber attacks and stock market returns for a sample of U.S. based cybersecurity defense contractors from 2000 to 2020, I empirically demonstrate that an escalation in the intensity of state-sponsored cyber attacks prompts a behavioral shift among investors and regulators, leading to increased co-movement in firms’ stock returns. This paper thus adds a novel dimension to our understanding of the complex interplay between state-sponsored cyber attacks and the market dynamics of cybersecurity defense contractors, with important implications for national cybersecurity.

Research on platform power indicates a preference alignment between consumers and platforms against regulation. However, recent scandals have changed public opinion toward platforms and undermined their structural coalition with consumers. I argue that amid the techlash, platforms need to actively mobilize the public and face an uphill battle in doing so. Based on the outside lobbying literature, I expect that platforms’ success in reframing the debate and signaling public discontent to policymakers depends on the perceptibility of the target audience (the bonding surface) and the characteristics of competing interest groups. I test my expectations by analyzing platform outside lobbying against the 2019 European Copyright Directive. I combine process-tracing and time-series analysis with textual data. A comparison between the German and French debates revealed that platform outside lobbying failed because negative media reporting, public opinion, and a creative economy dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in France provided a favorable bonding surface for the frames of pro-copyright groups. Pro-copyright groups could credibly criticize platforms’ exploitative practices and demand fair artist remuneration, while platforms’ frames did not stick. This study demonstrates that claims of structural platform power are exaggerated and that careful attention needs to be paid to lobbying dynamics.

Businesspeople are expected to invest in political connections when the institutions are weak. Using an original dataset from Russia in 2003–2010, we document changes in political connections of the richest businesspeople and show that within the institutional environment of a fledgling autocracy political engagement stops paying off, and the businesspeople retreat from politics. The businesspeople’s political disengagement reveals their insider assessment of the quality of Russian political institutions, indicating that as autocracy consolidated in Russia, its political institutional structure was in decay. This finding contributes to our understanding of authoritarian institutions, suggesting that even though autocracies nowadays might be institutionalized to a much higher degree, in the short-run autocracy is still detrimental to institutionalization.

Scholars have called for additional research into the antecedents to corporate political activity (CPA), including why firms may engage in specific kinds of CPA. In response, in what we believe to be a first-of-its-kind study, we rely on upper echelons theory to explore the relationship between CEO personality and the kind of CPA in which a firm engages. In particular, we argue that certain traits will be related to ideological CPA (iCPA) that is less beneficial to the firm but which will appeal to CEOs with those traits. We also propose that managerial discretion will moderate the relationship between CEO personality and this form of opportunistic CPA. We test our hypotheses using a unique database combined with a variety of archival sources, resulting in a sample of 329 publicly traded firms from the S&P 500 for which we had complete records that engaged in CPA 63,142 times over a ten-year period (2011–2020). We find that CEO agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism will be negatively related to iCPA, while CEO openness will be positively associated with it. We further find that managerial discretion moderates the relationship of CEO extraversion and openness with iCPA, however in opposite directions. Finally, we discuss theoretical and managerial implications and propose directions for future research.

Space as a domain of economic and security competition between great powers has risen to become an arena of active statecraft for middle powers in the twenty-first century. It has set a high-stake stage for not only continuing struggles for catch-up industrialization of late developers but also offering opportunities to capture commercial gains of technological breakthroughs and globalization of markets. We examine these challenges for Taiwan and Thailand, surveying major trends in the emerging space industry and exploring four analytical perspectives on how government-business relations shape adaptive national industrial policies in high-technology sectors with proliferating end-users. We argue that the Asian developmental state model is evolving in response to specific challenges of a global supply chain for commercial space activities dominated by leading space firms and government regulatory actions in the United States. Significant differences in Taiwan’s and Thailand’s space and industrial policy approaches will likely create divergent technological trajectories and reinforce current constraints on improving national security. The longer-term prospect for middle spacepowers remains contingent on the space race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

In the last few years, legitimacy has proven to be a fundamental power resource for the business class. Building on the idea of “discursive power,” investigations have demonstrated that when the business class successfully shapes public discourses and public opinion, its power increases. With this article, we contribute to this research by showing that businesses’ success in building discursive power, as expressed in individual trust in private companies, is limited by individual- and macro-level factors associated with class inequality, class politics, and power. Using data from 15 Latin American countries (2005–2015), we show that in the period studied, the propensity to trust private companies was significantly lower among those in underprivileged class positions (e.g., working-class people or the informal self-employed) and among those who identify with the political left and have less confidence in political institutions. At the macro level, trust in companies was lower in countries ruled by the left or in countries where inequality rose or where citizens’ trust in political institutions improved. At the end of this article, we identify three patterns of business legitimacy in Latin America and show how our results contribute to the recent research on trust, class, and power.

China’s strong economic presence in Africa has resulted in an increased interdisciplinary debate. Our contribution is the incorporation of a business perspective by uncovering the prominence and role of business in China’s diplomatic Africa engagement. Our theoretical contribution by applying the state-business relations (SBR) literature is to examine whether established frameworks can be expanded by an international dimension through intergovernmental initiatives like the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). The paper conducts a document analysis of all declarations and Action Plans of all FOCAC conferences in the period 2000–2021, combining both a content and a thematic analysis based on an explorative and iterative coding process. Our data suggests that the prominence of businesses has increased while the scope of their activities and the number of focus sectors (especially infrastructure) has risen particularly since 2012. Companies are considered as enablers for political and economic goals in the state-driven FOCAC. We find that SBR frameworks are applicable to international contexts and propose an expanded SBR approach integrating transnational intermediary institutions like the intergovernmental FOCAC and transnational business platforms which facilitate positive state-business relations across countries and a conducive business environment.

Housing is a critical part of every state’s infrastructure. However, in most advanced economies the state no longer builds very much of it, leaving it instead to private housebuilders. Because of their control over the supply of land, and the barriers to entry into the housebuilding industry, private housebuilders have potentially major structural power over the state. At the same time, private housebuilders are also tied to their land, and face other barriers to exit, thus limiting their ability to relocate capital elsewhere. Drawing on a range of secondary data sources, including earnings calls transcripts, annual reports and government policy documents, this paper demonstrates how the three largest volume housebuilders in England leveraged their structural power to shape the mortgage market support schemes that were introduced in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. These schemes have since underpinned their exceptional levels of profitability. We conclude, though, that far from being an absolute resource, this structural power was only enabled by the prevailing neoliberal, home-owning Anglo-liberal ‘growth model’ in which these housebuilders were embedded.

Using archival material from states, international organizations, and business actors, this paper explores how the Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments (APPI), a transnational business interest association (BIA), liaised with different international institutions to lobby for better foreign investment protection. We zoom in on the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Bank to examine how APPI influenced the global institutional landscape during its heydays from 1958 until 1974. We show that business actors, particularly oil and banking corporations, created APPI as a nimble, efficient alliance that could move faster than existing BIAs. We further demonstrate how companies “forum shop” between different BIAs, and how APPI injected its ideas into the policymaking process, using the framework of the three faces of power. By shedding light on the role private business actors played in foreign investor protection, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the emergence of global economic governance in the second half of the 20th century.