In 2019, the prime ministers of the United Kingdom and Australia both declared their intent to ban indirect, or secondary, boycotts. In the United Kingdom, the ban was directed against public bodies engaging in the “boycott, divest, and sanction” (BDS) campaign against Israel. In Australia, the proposed ban was directed against environmental action groups. Research on market-based activism to date has focused primarily on conceptualizing the use of the market by nonstate actors to achieve social change, with less attention paid to the role of the state in these dynamics. State efforts to curtail social movements’ repertoires of contention require careful scrutiny to understand the state's role in legitimizing or delegitimizing political activism and to reveal the complex power dynamics between corporations, social movements, and the state. This article analyzes two key instances of the state declaring an intent to prevent activists from protesting through the market. By investigating how indirect boycotts were problematized by state actors, we aim to reveal the rationale behind the state's intervention in marketplace politics. Our findings indicate that opposition to the political cause behind the boycott, rather than a problematization of the strategy itself, drives state intervention.
{"title":"Banning indirect boycotts: Contentious interactions and the role of the state in marketplace activism","authors":"Erin O’Brien, Hope Johnson, Y. Murray","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.17","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 2019, the prime ministers of the United Kingdom and Australia both declared their intent to ban indirect, or secondary, boycotts. In the United Kingdom, the ban was directed against public bodies engaging in the “boycott, divest, and sanction” (BDS) campaign against Israel. In Australia, the proposed ban was directed against environmental action groups. Research on market-based activism to date has focused primarily on conceptualizing the use of the market by nonstate actors to achieve social change, with less attention paid to the role of the state in these dynamics. State efforts to curtail social movements’ repertoires of contention require careful scrutiny to understand the state's role in legitimizing or delegitimizing political activism and to reveal the complex power dynamics between corporations, social movements, and the state. This article analyzes two key instances of the state declaring an intent to prevent activists from protesting through the market. By investigating how indirect boycotts were problematized by state actors, we aim to reveal the rationale behind the state's intervention in marketplace politics. Our findings indicate that opposition to the political cause behind the boycott, rather than a problematization of the strategy itself, drives state intervention.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81337381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniel J. Mallinson, Lauren Azevedo, E. Best, Pedro Robles, Jue Wang
The myriad applications of artificial intelligence (AI) by the private and public sectors have exploded in the public consciousness in the postpandemic period. However, researchers and businesses have been working on AI technology applications for decades, and in many ways, governments are rushing to catch up. This article presents an argument that the future of AI policy in the United States will be driven in large part by current and future state-level policy experiments. This argument is presented by drawing on scholarship surrounding federalism, regulatory fragmentation, and the effects of fragmentation on business and social equity. The article then presents the case of autonomous vehicle policy in the states to illustrate the degree of current fragmentation and considers the effects of layering new AI policies on top of existing rules surrounding privacy, licensing, and more. Following this consideration of existing research and its application of AI policy, the article presents a research agenda for leveraging state differences to study the effects of AI policy and develop a cohesive framework for governing AI.
{"title":"The Future of AI Is in the States: The Case of Autonomous Vehicle Policies","authors":"Daniel J. Mallinson, Lauren Azevedo, E. Best, Pedro Robles, Jue Wang","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.19","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The myriad applications of artificial intelligence (AI) by the private and public sectors have exploded in the public consciousness in the postpandemic period. However, researchers and businesses have been working on AI technology applications for decades, and in many ways, governments are rushing to catch up. This article presents an argument that the future of AI policy in the United States will be driven in large part by current and future state-level policy experiments. This argument is presented by drawing on scholarship surrounding federalism, regulatory fragmentation, and the effects of fragmentation on business and social equity. The article then presents the case of autonomous vehicle policy in the states to illustrate the degree of current fragmentation and considers the effects of layering new AI policies on top of existing rules surrounding privacy, licensing, and more. Following this consideration of existing research and its application of AI policy, the article presents a research agenda for leveraging state differences to study the effects of AI policy and develop a cohesive framework for governing AI.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72502548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Private regulations are often presented as low-cost and flexible institutions that can act as policy incubators. In this article, I question under which conditions they go beyond legal compliance and experiment with new rules. Based on a content analysis of 126 data privacy regulations adopted between 1995 and 2016 in the European Union and the United States and thirty-five semistructured interviews, I show that most private regulations include no regulatory novelties. By disaggregating the temporal and spatial distribution of the few novelties, I add nuance to this overall finding and show that private regulations adopted in the United States before 2000 experimented more than others. I argue that this variation reflects the different demands for private regulation in the two jurisdictions and their evolution over time. In the European Union, the early adoption of privacy laws led public regulators and businesses to look for private regulations to reduce transaction costs and thus limited their interest in experimenting with new requirements. In the United States, businesses hoped to gain a first-mover advantage by including new data privacy rules in their private regulations. However, the growing use of private regulations to ease transnational data flows also led to their use as tools to reduce transaction costs.
{"title":"Novelty and the demand for private regulation: Evidence from data privacy governance","authors":"Guillaume Beaumier","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.16","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Private regulations are often presented as low-cost and flexible institutions that can act as policy incubators. In this article, I question under which conditions they go beyond legal compliance and experiment with new rules. Based on a content analysis of 126 data privacy regulations adopted between 1995 and 2016 in the European Union and the United States and thirty-five semistructured interviews, I show that most private regulations include no regulatory novelties. By disaggregating the temporal and spatial distribution of the few novelties, I add nuance to this overall finding and show that private regulations adopted in the United States before 2000 experimented more than others. I argue that this variation reflects the different demands for private regulation in the two jurisdictions and their evolution over time. In the European Union, the early adoption of privacy laws led public regulators and businesses to look for private regulations to reduce transaction costs and thus limited their interest in experimenting with new requirements. In the United States, businesses hoped to gain a first-mover advantage by including new data privacy rules in their private regulations. However, the growing use of private regulations to ease transnational data flows also led to their use as tools to reduce transaction costs.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91338785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Individual firms have become the dominant lobby actors in the European Union, while associational business interest representation has declined. This is alarming because individual firms tend to overlook the long-term interests of society by focusing on what is important in the short term for their own survival. How can we explain this trend? This article argues that globalization is a key driver of firm-level lobbying and that it fractures business interest representation. The study employs an original dataset of almost 14,000 lobby contacts between senior staff of the European Commission, business interests, and NGOs. It finds support for the argument that globalization spurs individual firm lobbying in the European Union. This complicates the already challenging task of business associations aggregating and channeling the interests of their members.
{"title":"Economic globalization and the fracturing of business interest representation in the European Union","authors":"Marcel Hanegraaff, A. Poletti, E. Aizenberg","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.15","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Individual firms have become the dominant lobby actors in the European Union, while associational business interest representation has declined. This is alarming because individual firms tend to overlook the long-term interests of society by focusing on what is important in the short term for their own survival. How can we explain this trend? This article argues that globalization is a key driver of firm-level lobbying and that it fractures business interest representation. The study employs an original dataset of almost 14,000 lobby contacts between senior staff of the European Commission, business interests, and NGOs. It finds support for the argument that globalization spurs individual firm lobbying in the European Union. This complicates the already challenging task of business associations aggregating and channeling the interests of their members.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88266087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
To lobby legislators, it is important for interest groups to signal their ability to help legislators win elections and provide them with policy-relevant information. We explore for-profit companies’ use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports as a signaling device to promote their reputation to legislators and convey their ability to provide electoral and policymaking support, which is valuable for lobbying. To this end, we create a panel dataset by combining ESG reports issued by US companies and the same companies’ lobbying and campaign contribution records from 1999 to 2017. We expect companies to issue more ESG reports, as well as reports containing more quantitative content, when they lobby. The data conform to our expectations. We also reason that lobbying may be more strongly related to ESG reporting when it is coupled with campaign contributions made by affiliated corporate political action committees, but the data do not support this expectation.
{"title":"Corporate Lobbying and ESG Reports: Patterns among US Companies, 1999–2017","authors":"Huchen Liu, Sijing Wei, Jiarui Zhang","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.10","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 To lobby legislators, it is important for interest groups to signal their ability to help legislators win elections and provide them with policy-relevant information. We explore for-profit companies’ use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports as a signaling device to promote their reputation to legislators and convey their ability to provide electoral and policymaking support, which is valuable for lobbying. To this end, we create a panel dataset by combining ESG reports issued by US companies and the same companies’ lobbying and campaign contribution records from 1999 to 2017. We expect companies to issue more ESG reports, as well as reports containing more quantitative content, when they lobby. The data conform to our expectations. We also reason that lobbying may be more strongly related to ESG reporting when it is coupled with campaign contributions made by affiliated corporate political action committees, but the data do not support this expectation.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"268 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83003614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An efficient allocation of talents through occupational choice is central to modern economic growth. Removing developmental barriers unfavorable to entrepreneurship and artificially imposed for political reasons (i.e., the cage theory) might be a plausible channel for China's superb economic performance. Using a newly compiled dataset on China's Super Rich Persons, the regression kink design reports supportive evidence on the politically induced structural change in the social composition of entrepreneurs using Deng Xiaoping's Southern Talks as an event shock. Consistent with a pro-market talent allocation framework, this article finds that (1) the share of super-rich entrepreneurs with state sector experience and a college degree declined, suggesting that the period of the Southern Talks opened a window of opportunity for venturing, and (2) the effects on the attributes of the parental father of the entrepreneurs are somewhat limited.
{"title":"Serving the People or the People's Note: On the Political Economy of Talent Allocation","authors":"Kezhou Xiao","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.11","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 An efficient allocation of talents through occupational choice is central to modern economic growth. Removing developmental barriers unfavorable to entrepreneurship and artificially imposed for political reasons (i.e., the cage theory) might be a plausible channel for China's superb economic performance. Using a newly compiled dataset on China's Super Rich Persons, the regression kink design reports supportive evidence on the politically induced structural change in the social composition of entrepreneurs using Deng Xiaoping's Southern Talks as an event shock. Consistent with a pro-market talent allocation framework, this article finds that (1) the share of super-rich entrepreneurs with state sector experience and a college degree declined, suggesting that the period of the Southern Talks opened a window of opportunity for venturing, and (2) the effects on the attributes of the parental father of the entrepreneurs are somewhat limited.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80656737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There has been a brewing argument on the effects of economic globalization on the repression of human rights. My argument in this article joins the optimistic perspective on the relationship between the globalizing economy and state repression. I argue that governments consider backlash from investors in their decisions about whether to use repression. Investors, motivated by international human rights norms and a fear of violent conflict, would prefer that governments not introduce brute force into a nonviolent protest. Thus, governments in countries that depend more on foreign direct investment (FDI) should be less likely to use violence against protesters than those that are less dependent on FDI. Using data analysis of protest events and inward FDI stock, I test this argument and find a negative relationship between these two variables.
{"title":"Foreign Direct Investment Hosts and Violent Government Repression of Protests","authors":"S. O. Adelaiye","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.12","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 There has been a brewing argument on the effects of economic globalization on the repression of human rights. My argument in this article joins the optimistic perspective on the relationship between the globalizing economy and state repression. I argue that governments consider backlash from investors in their decisions about whether to use repression. Investors, motivated by international human rights norms and a fear of violent conflict, would prefer that governments not introduce brute force into a nonviolent protest. Thus, governments in countries that depend more on foreign direct investment (FDI) should be less likely to use violence against protesters than those that are less dependent on FDI. Using data analysis of protest events and inward FDI stock, I test this argument and find a negative relationship between these two variables.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78262184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Nowadays, a growing number of firms utilize corporate lobbying to advocate for more environmentally friendly policies and regulations, deviating from the traditional lobbying mainly used to minimize regulatory burdens. In this study, we investigate what motivates firms to engage in such an unusual type of lobbying—environmental lobbying. Focusing on the product strategy of firms, we suggest that firms with greater green product intensity are more likely to engage in environmental lobbying. When environmental lobbying raises environmental hurdles in the market, firms with an intensive focus on green products can bear adjustment costs with little effort, leaving other “less green” firms relatively disadvantaged under the newly regulated market conditions. Moreover, those firms can address demand-side issues more easily by lobbying the government to provide greater incentives for purchasing green products or to request subsidies that can be used to improve their cost structure. Our analyses based on the US light vehicle market indicate that, indeed, the more electric vehicles automakers sell relative to their total sale volumes, the more they will engage in environmental lobbying. We also find that this relationship becomes more salient when a firm has greater market share or originally comes from a foreign country with more stringent environmental regulations than the United States.
{"title":"Green Product Portfolio and Environmental Lobbying","authors":"Jihyun Eun, Minjung Lee, Young Hoon Jung","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.7","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Nowadays, a growing number of firms utilize corporate lobbying to advocate for more environmentally friendly policies and regulations, deviating from the traditional lobbying mainly used to minimize regulatory burdens. In this study, we investigate what motivates firms to engage in such an unusual type of lobbying—environmental lobbying. Focusing on the product strategy of firms, we suggest that firms with greater green product intensity are more likely to engage in environmental lobbying. When environmental lobbying raises environmental hurdles in the market, firms with an intensive focus on green products can bear adjustment costs with little effort, leaving other “less green” firms relatively disadvantaged under the newly regulated market conditions. Moreover, those firms can address demand-side issues more easily by lobbying the government to provide greater incentives for purchasing green products or to request subsidies that can be used to improve their cost structure. Our analyses based on the US light vehicle market indicate that, indeed, the more electric vehicles automakers sell relative to their total sale volumes, the more they will engage in environmental lobbying. We also find that this relationship becomes more salient when a firm has greater market share or originally comes from a foreign country with more stringent environmental regulations than the United States.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135717377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Research has examined the impact of the “entrepreneurial university” on regional socioeconomic development by focusing on the entrepreneurial intentions and performance of alumni, staff, and students. The study of impact, to date, has focused on direct and short-term mechanisms, such as alumni's entrepreneurial activities, faculty spin-outs, and active public engagement with policy agendas. Our point of departure is in conceptualizing and empirically testing a longer-term and more systemic mechanism. We theorize and empirically test how the entrepreneurial university imprints on its graduates, some of whom take on leadership positions in innovation policymaking years later. We test this relationship by employing a text-as-data approach to examine the extent to which innovation policy leaders speak about startup-centric innovation, comparing the media coverage of entrepreneurial university alumni relative to their peers. Our original dataset comprises the 485 individuals who held senior innovation policy positions in East Asia's eleven largest economies from 1998 to 2019, detailing their educational background and media coverage (10,816 documents). We conceptualize the “alumni policymaker” mechanism, which constitutes entrepreneurial university alumni shaping the future of national innovation policy by referring to startup-centric innovation three times more than their peers. Those who completed MBAs at entrepreneurial universities express an even greater preference for startup-centric innovation policy.
{"title":"The Entrepreneurial University's Impact on Regional Socioeconomic Development: The “Alumni Policymaker” Mechanism","authors":"R. Klingler‐Vidra, A. Chalmers","doi":"10.1017/bap.2023.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2023.9","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Research has examined the impact of the “entrepreneurial university” on regional socioeconomic development by focusing on the entrepreneurial intentions and performance of alumni, staff, and students. The study of impact, to date, has focused on direct and short-term mechanisms, such as alumni's entrepreneurial activities, faculty spin-outs, and active public engagement with policy agendas. Our point of departure is in conceptualizing and empirically testing a longer-term and more systemic mechanism. We theorize and empirically test how the entrepreneurial university imprints on its graduates, some of whom take on leadership positions in innovation policymaking years later. We test this relationship by employing a text-as-data approach to examine the extent to which innovation policy leaders speak about startup-centric innovation, comparing the media coverage of entrepreneurial university alumni relative to their peers. Our original dataset comprises the 485 individuals who held senior innovation policy positions in East Asia's eleven largest economies from 1998 to 2019, detailing their educational background and media coverage (10,816 documents). We conceptualize the “alumni policymaker” mechanism, which constitutes entrepreneurial university alumni shaping the future of national innovation policy by referring to startup-centric innovation three times more than their peers. Those who completed MBAs at entrepreneurial universities express an even greater preference for startup-centric innovation policy.","PeriodicalId":39749,"journal":{"name":"Business and Politics","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80035307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}