The Movement for Corporate Political Accountability

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This project will study the sources and effects of the social movement that has been pressuring major corporations to disclose more information about their political expenditures. This social movement, involving both conventional outside activist groups and insider investor-activists, has been building for over a decade now. The primary research goals of this project are to understand which firms are targeted by activists, which have changed their specific disclosure practices, which have gone even further and started restricting certain expenditures, and whether information related to political disclosure affects firms in the stock market and in terms of investor perceptions. The findings of this project will inform policy proposals, both internal and external to firms, regarding political disclosure requirements for U.S. corporations, which have been an ongoing topic of debate among policymakers. Results of these investigations will be disseminated widely through scholarly articles and writings for general-interest audiences including business and political leaders and the broader public. The project will also train graduate and undergraduate students and generate a variety of public-use datasets that will allow for further investigations by other scholars, as well as by journalists and students. The research goals will be pursued in several ways. Original databases of protests and political expenditure controversies (based on media reports) surrounding S&P 1500 firms over the period from 2005-2016 will be created. One analysis will examine how firms' past political activity and corporate interlock networks affect their likelihood of being targeted by either outside or investor activists. Another analysis will investigate how protests and corporate shareholder resolutions affect firms' likelihood of changing their disclosure practices or restricting expenditures. Interviews with leading shareholder-activists will be conducted. A Cumulative Abnormal Returns (CAR) event-study of how expenditure-related controversies affect firms' stock prices will be performed. A series of experiments will be conducted to examine how changes to political disclosure practices affect investor perceptions of a firm's value. The project will advance scholarship in political and economic sociology, particularly regarding the political power of U.S. corporations in light of weakening corporate networks alongside rising shareholder capitalism. It will also advance research at the intersection of social movements and organizational theory. Lastly, the study will draw attention to the diverse corporate lobbying strategies employed by contemporary firms and how those strategies are perceived by investors, publics, and policymakers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.