Comparing corporate political strategy: How firms adapt to different political systems

Large corporations have both the resources and motivation to actively engage in the policymaking process, with the goal of shaping aspects of public policy that may affect them. In contast to current reserach, we analyse this behaviour from a comparative perspective. We argue that firms target policymakers that are at once cooperative and pivotal within a given political system. We asses these arguments with survey data on 79 large corporations across the three largest Western economies: the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The results show that the quality of a firms’ relationship with policymakers is a key factor shaping corporate political strategy. Moreover, the distribution of corporate lobbying across venues reflects national variation in the distribution of decision making powers. In particular, in the US, firms place significantly more emphasis on lobbying their bureaucracy compared to firms in Britain and Germany.