Using a panel data of S&P 500 Index firms covering 1998–2004, this paper compares the determinants of lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions and estimates the returns to lobbying as assessed by the financial market. Lobbying depends more on managerial incentives and protection needs beyond industry structures than contributions do. Lobbying also has a positive effect on the firm's equity returns relative to the market and, to a lesser degree, relative to its industry.

Structural power is a critical variable that merits more extensive and more explicit attention in Latin American political economy and in comparative politics more broadly. Assessing structural power in conjunction with its counterpart, instrumental power, can provide strong leverage for explaining variation in policy outcomes that affect business interests. However, structural power must be carefully defined and operationalized in order to capture its core attributes and nuances. This task requires wedding the concept's “structural” underpinnings with policymakers’ perceptions and anticipated reactions. Moreover, the relationship between structural power and instrumental power must be carefully theorized. While these concepts encompass distinct channels through which business exerts influence, the two types of power may be mutually reinforcing. I argue that business interests shape policy outcomes when either their structural power or their instrumental power is strong, yet business influence will be more extensive and more consistent when structural power and instrumental power are both strong. However, electoral incentives, and more importantly, popular mobilization, can counteract business power. I illustrate these theoretical points with a case study of Chile's 2014 tax reform proposal, a major policy initiative with important distributive consequences that received international press attention.

A large literature examines corporate political activity in the United States, but much less is known about firms’ lobbying activities and policy influence in developing countries. I argue that firm-level heterogeneity helps explain firms’ political behavior, while political institutions shape policymakers’ incentives to respond to business interests. The empirical analysis relies on the World Bank's Enterprise Survey, which covers over 20,000 firms operating in 42 developing and transition countries, to examine the determinants of lobbying and perceived policy influence. Multilevel estimates support the hypotheses that lobbying and influence increase with the firm's size and market power. Additionally, I find that firms report greater policy influence in democracies than in non-democracies.

This article starts by highlighting the significance of two forms of authority'private and technical authority'that are becoming increasingly important relative to public authority, which traditionally has been considered the only relevant form of authority in international affairs. It then suggests that public, private and technical authority are related to one another not by the erasure of one by another, but rather through a process of politicized functional differentiation. Functional differentiation involves the transformation of multi-functional units into a set of more autonomous units that are related to one another in specific limited ways. The article explores differentiation between and within each of the three types of authority in the globalization of accounting, and the role of power as well. It challenges the view that globalization necessarily involves a centralized exercise of power or an elimination of differences.

Despite extensive research on political activity on the part of corporations, clear and consistent findings remain elusive. We identify three reasons for this failure. First, most of the empirical literature on corporate political activity simply studies the wrong phenomena by examining political action committees rather than lobbying more generally. Second, the literature studies an excessively narrow sample of organizations that might engage in lobbying, focusing almost always on extremely large corporations, which inevitably attenuates variance on many of the variables hypothesized to influence engagement in political activity. And third, prior work is rarely attentive to the diversity of corporate activities, narrowly conceptualizing vital aspects of the business context that might influence decisions to engage in political activity. Based on this critique, we develop and test new models of corporate political activity, finding that the diversity of the economic context within which firms work and firm size matter a great deal, if in ways somewhat different from those reported in prior work.

How did the most severe global financial crisis since the 1930s affect the organization of the world political economy? Was Anglo-American structural power in finance eroded? I employ network methodologies that have been recently extended for use with weighted and directed networks to shed light on these questions. I draw from complexity science and political economy to link these empirics to prior theories of structural power, which I refine in several ways. This approach provides unique explanations for developments in global banking since the crisis, including expected outcomes that did not occur: the continuation – and even expansion – of Anglo-American prominence, the decline of continental European prominence, and the lack of emergence of the BRICS economies into the core of the global banking system.

This paper investigates whether Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) decisions are influenced by state ownership. The literature has established that host country institutions affect FDI allocation, but there is no systematic evidence how state ownership affects such relationships. However, we expect that state ownership systematically affects the relation between host country institutions and FDI. Theoretical arguments indicate that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) should invest relatively more than privately owned enterprises (POEs) in countries with poor rule of law, poor property rights protection and a high degree of corruption. However, SOEs are expected to invest relatively less than POEs in dictatorships and countries with poor human rights protection. We test these hypotheses, using a new dataset on Norwegian firms' FDI from 1998 to 2006. The empirical analysis suggests that SOEs invest relatively more than POEs in countries with high level of corruption and weak rule of law. Indeed, SOEs' FDI appears not to be reduced by such institutional risk factors. However, there is no solid evidence indicating that SOEs invest more in democracies and countries with better human rights protection.

An increasing number of firms are engaging in social and environmental initiatives beyond their core business activities. While much has been written about why business should spend resources on social and environmental causes, relatively few studies have systematically addressed the question of why certain companies actually do engage in such activities. A notable exception is literature on the ‘business case’ for corporate social responsibility, which argues that good social and environmental performance will positively affect a company's financial results. The evidence on this link, however, is mixed. Even if there is an economic rationale, it is not clear why some companies engage in social activities while others do not. And, why do many more companies today ‘see’ the business case than in the past? This paper maps out the theoretical terrain exploring this question and categorizes the various existing explanations for corporate social engagement.

Business is often assumed to resist increased social and environmental regulation, preferring voluntary or soft-law approaches to global governance. This article analyzes the dynamics between CSR, soft law, and hard law by exploring corporate attitudes in the Nordic area towards CSR and regulation'an area reputed to be a forerunner in both CSR and social and environmental regulation. The analysis, based on a survey of the Nordic companies with the strongest CSR performance, reveals skepticism towards relying on CSR and voluntary approaches, combined with a very strong preference for increased international regulation of social and environmental issues. Drawing on insights from recent analyses in the governance literature, the article discusses the conditions under which business favors increased social and environmental regulation, concluding that corporate self-interest and increased international regulation can indeed coincide.

This article traces the ascent of the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) from an obscure group with little influence in the early 1970s to a pre-eminent position as global accounting standard-setter in 2001. I argue that the rise of the IASC can be explained by several factors, including the IASC's ability to build legitimacy through technical expertise, to embed itself in a network of international organizations, and to benefit from rivalries among developed and developing countries and among European and American regulators. But the most important reason for the IASC's success is that its core values aligned strongly with the interests of the most powerful regulator-the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

This paper outlines an approach for understanding the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in global governance. We develop a typology of regime types with two dimensions, the goal of the regime, which can be market enabling or regulatory, and the location of authority, which can be national, regional, or international, with public and private elements. MNCs tend to support the creation of market enabling regimes at the international level, and prefer to keep social or environmental regulation under national or private authority. However, these are only generalizations and MNCs develop preferences based on their relative influence in various arenas, the costs of political participation, and competitive considerations. We argue that institutions of global governance represent the outcome of a series of negotiations among corporations, states, and non-state actors. The preferences and power of MNCs vary across issues and sectors, and from one negotiating forum to another, accounting for the uneven and fragmented nature of the resulting system. Our approach differs from the traditional FDI bargaining framework in that it recognizes the multi-party nature of negotiations and multiple sources of power. Moreover, the complexity and dynamic nature of the process results in a somewhat indeterminate process.

This paper uses newly available data from the 1995 Lobby Disclosure Act to assess the argument that PAC contributions are used to gain access to legislators. First, we find a much stronger connection between lobbying and campaign contributions than previous statistical research has revealed—groups that have both a lobbyist and a PAC account for 70 percent of all interest group expenditures and 86 percent of all PAC contributions. Second, we find that groups that engage in relatively large amounts of lobbying-and therefore presumably have a high demand for access—allocate their campaign contributions differently than groups that do not. Groups that emphasize lobbying pay more attention to members' positions of power inside Congress, and less attention to members' electoral circumstances, than other groups. Groups that emphasize lobbying also appear to be more bipartisan and less ideological than other groups, giving more equally to both parties and more broadly across the ideological spectrum.

In the study of corporate political activity in the United States, scholars have consistently relied on samples comprised entirely or principally of large firms. While scholars have raised the issue of bias in these samples, there have been no systematic examinations of the consequences for causal inference. We address this issue directly by comparing the results of comprehensive models that examine corporate lobbying using both large-firm and randomly-generated samples. We find that while there are some notable differences, they are certainly not so large as to lead us to question fundamentally the results of decades of scholarship. In short, the results generated using a random sample lead to causal inferences largely consistent with those in the theoretical and empirical literature. In particular, firms' resources and interactions with government condition both their decisions to lobby and the level of their activity.

Guanxi and guanxi capitalism are much-debated terms in the context of China's evolving political economy. This article explores the changing nature of China's guanxi capitalism. It analyzes first various aspects of guanxi capitalism, a unique conceptual blend infused with seemingly incongruous cultural and historical meanings drawn from both Chinese and Western roots. It then introduces three case studies of private firms, illustrating empirically how Chinese entrepreneurs' relationship with the political system is evolving. The article ends by assessing the ways in which political factors, guanxi practices and capitalist accumulation are interacting and changing. I hold that guanxi capitalism is playing a crucial role in realigning the interests of state and capital in China. It yields idiosyncratic benefits to certain Chinese private firms, while also bridging the logics of freewheeling capital accumulation and authoritarian control in a state-dominated economy. In this view, guanxi capitalism encompasses both contradictory and complementary institutional logics. Since the persistence of Leninist control generates “deliberate ambiguity” in how China's private sector is governed, the penetration of guanxi networks into government-business relations creates institutional space that enables both Leninist control and relentless capital accumulation to proceed, in turn lending China's emergent capitalism a unique quality.

Most scholarship on corporate political activity assumes that market forces wholly motivate firms’ political strategies. However, this conventional wisdom overlooks the role of employee groups in encouraging corporate activism. To evaluate whether employee groups are associated with firm social activism, we gathered all public statements in support of LGBT rights made by the five hundred largest publicly-traded US corporations from 2011 to 2017. In an exploratory observational analysis, we found robust evidence that in highly-educated workforces LGBT employee groups persuade management to take public stances in support of LGBT rights. Our findings suggest that internal pressure promotes activism on LGBT issues, and market, political, or social forces are insufficient to fully explain firm social activism. Although each does play an important role, since employee groups will use political, social, and especially market-based arguments to convince their managers to engage in activism.

This article develops an explanation for patterns of industrial specialization in emerging high-technology industries through a comparative analysis of wind and solar sectors in China, Germany, and the United States. Although governments have held similar industrial policy goals in the support of renewable energy industries, firms in all three economies have established distinct innovative capabilities in response to the policies of the state. This article shows that firms utilize both legacy institutions and engage in relational learning in global networks to carve out distinct niches in emerging industries. Based on an original dataset of more than 200 firm-level interviews, the article suggests that the rise of global value chains has widened the space for national diversity in industrial specialization. Firms no longer have to establish the full range of skills required to bring an idea from lab to market, but can specialize and collaborate with others. In this context, firms respond to industrial policy by incrementally building on existing industrial capabilities and by relying on familiar public resources and institutions, even in emerging industries. These findings point to the role of industrial legacies in shaping firms' positions in global value chains and show that firms are active agents in maintaining distinct industrial specializations and domestic institutions under conditions of globalization.

As renewable energy supply chains have grown increasingly globalized, national clean energy transitions have become highly influenced by international dynamics. However, these dynamics are themselves collectively shaped by domestic policy that drives the deployment of renewables. While spatial spillovers of domestic renewable energy policies have been studied on an aggregate level regarding policy diffusion or the flows of technology across countries, implications on an actor-level have been largely neglected. This article addresses this gap by analyzing global patterns of market openings for wind, solar PV, and biomass, focusing on the role of private project developers in developing countries. We use a mixed method design, based on a newly merged dataset encompassing eighty countries, and on interviews with pioneering project developers. Results highlight how patterns in market openings are shaped considerably by technology characteristics. Further, empirical results show international private developers are a key first mover in many developing countries. We explore drivers for this internationalization trend, including the impact of international developers' home country policies and the accumulation of tacit knowledge from home country markets for market openings abroad. Finally, we discuss implications for industrial policy and argue for further research on global spillovers of national policies on the actor-level.

A prominent variant of the compensation hypothesis rests on the premise that increased trade exposure heightens domestic economic volatility, prompting demands for compensation via generous systems of transfers and services. Economic theory suggests that because the expansion of international trade entails integration into larger, deeper, more stable markets, and may entail risk diversification, it may actually promote rather than reduce stability. By the same token, however, economic theory also suggests that smaller economies should experience greater levels of volatility than larger economies, and thus also greater levels of insecurity. The evidence presented here suggests that the level of domestic economic volatility in the developed economies, during the latter half of the twentieth century, may indeed have been driven by the size and depth of markets. And critically, for these countries international trade integration may have eased rather than accentuated domestic economic volatility.

Interest groups cannot enforce contracts with legislators to work in their favor since fee-for-service agreements would be considered bribery. When such contracts are not available, a system of specialized, standing committees can provide a second-best way to maximize contributions, since such a system facilitates repeated interactions and reputational development between PACs and members of the relevant committees. Using data on PAC contributions by competing financial services interests to members of the House Banking Committee, we find evidence consistent with key implications of our model of committees as reputational-development devises. We then interpret important episodes in the evolution and development of the committee system during the twentieth century from the perspective of our theory. We focus on the revolt against House Speaker Cannon, which resulted in the birth of the modern committee system, and the post-Watergate reforms. We also consider broader implications of this approach for analyzing term limits, corruption, and party strength. JEL classifications: D72, D78, G28.

The vast majority of papers written about interest groups' political influence focuses on the role of money in politics. Business and interest groups' participation in campaign finance, in the form of hard and soft money, has been the subject of hundreds of theoretical and empirical studies. Moreover, with the recent congressional moves to reform campaign finance laws, campaign finance studies have received a prominent position in public discourse.