Lobbying by business interests is of major public and academic concern. At the same time, firms are increasingly engaging in various activities related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ‘citizenship’. While these two modes of non‐market activity are fundamentally political in nature, business actors as well as researchers are frequently uncertain about how they (should) relate to each other: How do firms reconcile more overtly self‐interested corporate political activity (CPA) and with expectations of corporate social responsibility and citizenship? To investigate these questions, we analyze a new dataset of 2,000 firms from across the globe that contains information on their political and social activities. We develop and test empirical models of CPA and CSR to evaluate expectations that these two modes of behaviour can be explained by the same behavioural logic.
