Corporate Political Behaviour: How the Strategies of Large Firms Adapt to Changing Institutional Environments

Large firms have both the resources and motivation to actively engage in the policymaking process, with the goal of shaping aspects of public policy that may affect them. We argue that firms target policymakers that are at once cooperative and pivotal within the political system, and that this combination changes overtime, reflecting changes in the modes of governance. We asses these arguments with survey data from 2016 and 2026 on large firms across the three largest Western economies: the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The results for the unpublished 2016 survey show that the quality of a firms’ relationship with policymakers is a key factor shaping corporate political strategy. Moreover, the distribution of corporate lobbying across venues reflects national variation in the distribution of decision-making powers. In particular, in the US, firms place significantly more emphasis on lobbying their bureaucracy compared to firms in Britain and Germany. German firms target the legislature relatively more than American and British firms do. The extent to which this pattern holds 10 years on or whether observed variation reflects institutional changes will be analysed.