Corporate Responsibility and the State: Business Lobbying on Sustainability Issues in the UK

To what extent do the corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments of large corporations shape how these organizations lobby the state on related public policy issues? Are corporations with more stringent internal environmental and social sustainability policies more supportive of related state regulation or are these companies more likely to argue for voluntary forms of self-regulation as CSR-washing accounts often imply? We examine this question by analysing the testimony that representatives of Global Fortune 500 companies gave to the committees of the UK parliament when scrutinizing the 2008 Climate Change and 2015 Modern Slavery bills and their subsequent revisions in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Both acts were considered internationally pioneering pieces of legislation when adopted. But surprisingly little research has examined corporate lobbying on these bills. We utilize publicly-available ratings of the companies’ environmental, social and governance practices—our measure of company-level CSR—to compare how high and low CSR companies testified in front of these legislative committees. Our self-generated coding frame allows us to examine how supportive individual companies were of the specific measures contained in the climate change and modern slavery bills as well as how open to dialogue company representatives were during their testimony about these two high-profile social and environmental issues. Using the results of this content analysis we assess the extent to which a company’s internal environmental and social sustainability commitments translate into support for related public regulation or are used to argue against the need for state intervention into the market to address these policy issues.