Given growing worry about dark money electoral spending and covert forms of business lobbying – neither of which generally require federal reporting – a shareholder-activist movement has emerged to pressure companies to increase their voluntary political disclosures. This chapter investigates how companies are pressured for greater disclosure and how they respond. I find that firms are likely to be targeted if they are larger and more prominent, and engage in higher levels of conventional lobbying and electoral spending. Additional qualitative evidence shows that targeting follows from a firm’s receptivity to engagement and also if their spending appears contradictory to corporate values. Lastly, I investigate the likelihood that shareholder activism is successful, finding that apparent concessions are more likely after repeated targeting and during years of S&P 500 index constituency. The chapter draws conclusions about the prospects for greater transparency of corporate political expenditures in a time of uncertain government oversight.

This chapter introduces the concept of CPR and gives a high-level overview of the chapters to follow. It also defines key terms, presents some background statistics on political spending over time, and offers an initial discussion of the extent to which business has captured the political process.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) assume political responsibilities by contributing to national and global governance, influencing their legal and moral environments, and addressing sustainability issues. Scholars have developed various frameworks, most prominently corporate political activity (CPA), corporate citizenship (CC), political corporate social responsibility (PCSR), and corporate political responsibility (CPR), for theorizing the political role and responsibility of the corporation. This chapter analyzes the challenges of MNCs, advances their political responsibility, and explores the implications for theorizing about human resource management (HRM). We propose HRM should be extended to include a political agenda along two functions: as a “steward” taking care for the wellbeing of the firm’s work force and as an “enabler” making organizational members competent for helping others. On that basis, we offer a perspective on how political HRM can be conceived of in the CPR approach and contribute to its development.