The duality of corporate political activity: impact of institutions on lobbying and campaign contributions

Corporations actively engage in the public policy process to manage the influence of the state and public policy. The pervasive role of corporations and their money in politics has caused controversies and discussion about the desirability and the extent of their influence on politics. Most of the theoretically oriented research on corporate political activity has emphasized mainly economic and strategic determinants of corporations and industries to investigate why corporations engage in political activities. Considering growing social pressures over corporate use of political activities, however, there is a need to pay more attention to social and institutional environments that are likely to affect corporate political activity. Thus, I build upon the institutional theory to investigate how corporate political activity as strategic, self-interested behavior is affected by various institutional conditions. Drawing on the institutional theory, I argue that corporate use of highly visible political tactics is likely to be constrained by institutional push-pull factors, such as changes in regulations, industry norms, and media attention to corporate political activity, to maintain legitimacy in institutional environments when they engage in political activity. Moreover, I argue that corporate use of highly visible political tactics is influenced by organizational factors that are likely to affect the degree to which corporations are susceptible to institutional forces. In this dissertation, I examine the corporate use of lobbying and campaign contributions of the S&P 500 companies from 1998 to 2012, which are highly visible due to their disclosure requirement in the United States and thus provide an appealing context to examine the social meaning attached to political activities in institutional environments