Corporate Political Responsibility: Mobilizing the Private Sector for Political Integrity

How business acts in the political arena has a substantive, at times defining, impact on the integrity and fairness of policymaking and policy outcomes. Unfortunately, the conventional approach for regulating corporate conduct in this area faces a number of persistent challenges.
A confluence of several important dynamics, however, offers the promise that responsible corporate political conduct can be encouraged and advanced from a very different vantage point—a new ecosystem for corporate political responsibility is in the making. This ecosystem comes with a new cast of actors, new soft and hard accountability mechanisms and a trove of new resources, tools and collective action initiatives.
This Discussion paper presents an overview of this new governance regime, identifies the dynamics that drive its evolution, describes its main building blocks and discusses its limitations. Most importantly it lays out several suggestions for policymakers and practitioners for how the potential of this new accountability regime can be fully utilized to support political integrity and how it can be most productively interlinked with conventional money-in-politics regulations for maximum benefit.