Political Strategies as a Response to Public and Private Stakeholder Pressures

We aim at providing a more precise differentiation of external stakeholder pressures and their impact on multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries’ political strategies. Thus, we analyse whether external stakeholder pressures entail a more intense use of political strategies, and whether pressures from public stakeholders are more influencing compared to pressures from private stakeholders. We use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis to test our hypotheses with data from 157 subsidiaries in Brazil, Russia, Turkey, India, China and South Africa. We found that the higher external stakeholder pressures on the MNC subsidiary, the more intensely subsidiaries apply political strategies. Furthermore, both public and private stakeholder pressures affect political strategies in a positive way, but our results show no statistical significance for a difference in impact. The study differentiates the general concept of external stakeholder pressures into pressures from national public and national private stakeholders.