This article explores the use of laws to unduly silence critics of corporate human rights abuses. It considers the hypothesis that state and business elites align their interests, fuelling the employment of regulations to excessively impede naming and shaming activities. This article draws on socio-legal and critical legal studies to demonstrate how laws, while typically perceived as protective, can also serve to empower corporations and suppress dissent. It reviews examples of such collusion and calls for further case studies to better understand the interplay between business interests and regulatory practices.

Why do voters shun some business tycoons yet elect others into power? As structural conditions facilitate the entry of super-wealthy actors into politics, the differential electoral support across business elites suggests a puzzle. We conceptualize four mechanisms behind the popular support for “tycoon candidates”: competence signaling, framing, fame, and clientelism. To test their relative efficacy, we leverage an experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey in South Africa, an important developing democracy where certain tycoons are successfully running for office. We find that, across distinct electoral appeals by tycoon candidates, clientelism is particularly effective, especially for mobilizing support from the less affluent voters. Racial framing significantly decreases support among white voters. Meanwhile, tycoons’ competence signaling or fame do not help them at the ballot box. By identifying the micro-level underpinnings of voter support across tycoon candidates, our study contributes to the literatures on business and politics, voting behavior, and clientelism.

Milton Friedman’s idea of flexible exchange rates was heresy for Americans until the mid-1960s. However, by the late 1970s the idea became embedded in academic thought, policymaking, and business practices. This article analyzes how floating currencies, once eschewed, became embraced as legitimate in the US through the late 1960s and early 1970s. It demonstrates how business leaders’ economic interests and laissez-faire economists’ framework for causes of and solutions to business hardships contributed to society’s acceptance of currency flexibility. Increasing societal support of flexible currencies strengthened the power of float-advocates within the US government, facilitating the transition of the international monetary system from fixed exchange rates to floating. This study highlights how material interests and policy discourses contributed to America’s new policy orientation. It also addresses the origins of the neoliberal international financial order by documenting how American elites reconstituted the state-market balance in global finance while navigating monetary crises.

What explains subnational policy choices over tax cut after decentralization? We test two different explanations in the context of the 2002 tax reform in Russia. A popular strand of literature suggests that decentralization induces more regional competition over investment, motivating subnational tax cuts. A second body of literature suggests that personal business interests of regional governors can account for their different policy choices. Governors with personal business ties refrain from tax cuts because they increase market competition. We find no support for the regional competition hypothesis, but strong statistical evidence for the business connection hypothesis. Our findings have important implications for research on fiscal decentralization and on the connections between business interests of leaders and their policy choices.