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The Corporate Context of Lobbying Activity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Holly Brasher  and
David Lowery
Holly Brasher
Affiliation:
University of Alabama at Birmingham
David Lowery
Affiliation:
University of Leiden
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Abstract

Despite extensive research on political activity on the part of corporations, clear and consistent findings remain elusive. We identify three reasons for this failure. First, most of the empirical literature on corporate political activity simply studies the wrong phenomena by examining political action committees rather than lobbying more generally. Second, the literature studies an excessively narrow sample of organizations that might engage in lobbying, focusing almost always on extremely large corporations, which inevitably attenuates variance on many of the variables hypothesized to influence engagement in political activity. And third, prior work is rarely attentive to the diversity of corporate activities, narrowly conceptualizing vital aspects of the business context that might influence decisions to engage in political activity. Based on this critique, we develop and test new models of corporate political activity, finding that the diversity of the economic context within which firms work and firm size matter a great deal, if in ways somewhat different from those reported in prior work.

Keywords

LobbyingCollective ActionInterest Groups
Type
Article
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 2006 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © V.K. Aggarwal 2006 and published under exclusive license to Cambridge University Press 

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