Investigates to what extent business can get what it wants politically as firms and trade associations have a better understanding of the likely effects of policy than politicians and because their decisions partly determine these effects.

The large business corporation has become a governing institution in national and global politics. This study offers a critical account of its political dominance and lack of democratic legitimacy.

We have long been told that corporations rule the world, their interests seemingly taking precedence over states and their citizens. Yet, while states, civil society, and international organizations are well drawn in terms of their institutions, ideologies, and functions, the world's global corporations are often more simply sketched as mechanisms of profit maximization. In this book, John Mikler re-casts global corporations as political actors with complex identities and strategies. Debunking the idea of global corporations as exclusively profit-driven entities, he shows how they seek not only to drive or modify the agendas of states but to govern in their own right. He also explains why we need to re-territorialize global corporations as political actors that reflect and project the political power of the states and regions from which they hail. We know the global corporations' names, we know where they are headquartered, and we know where they invest and operate. Economic processes are increasingly produced by the control they possess, the relationships they have, the leverage they employ, the strategic decisions they make, and the discourses they create to enhance acceptance of their interests. This book represents a call to study how they do so, rather than making assumptions based on theoretical abstractions.

Most people believe that large corporations wield enormous political power when they lobby for policies as a cohesive bloc. With this controversial book, Mark A. Smith sets conventional wisdom on its head. In a systematic analysis of postwar lawmaking, Smith reveals that business loses in legislative battles unless it has public backing. This surprising conclusion holds because the types of issues that lead businesses to band together—such as tax rates, air pollution, and product liability—also receive the most media attention. The ensuing debates give citizens the information they need to hold their representatives accountable and make elections a choice between contrasting policy programs. Rather than succumbing to corporate America, Smith argues, representatives paradoxically become more responsive to their constituents when facing a united corporate front. Corporations gain the most influence over legislation when they work with organizations such as think tanks to shape Americans' beliefs about what government should and should not do.

Why does corporate governance--front page news with the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat--vary so dramatically around the world? This book explains how politics shapes corporate governance--how managers, shareholders, and workers jockey for advantage in setting the rules by which companies are run, and for whom they are run. It combines a clear theoretical model on this political interaction, with statistical evidence from thirty-nine countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America and detailed narratives of country cases. This book differs sharply from most treatments by explaining differences in minority shareholder protections and ownership concentration among countries in terms of the interaction of economic preferences and political institutions. It explores in particular the crucial role of pension plans and financial intermediaries in shaping political preferences for different rules of corporate governance. The countries examined sort into two distinct groups: diffuse shareholding by external investors who pick a board that monitors the managers, and concentrated blockholding by insiders who monitor managers directly. Examining the political coalitions that form among or across management, owners, and workers, the authors find that certain coalitions encourage policies that promote diffuse shareholding, while other coalitions yield blockholding-oriented policies. Political institutions influence the probability of one coalition defeating another.

The dynamics of business-government relations in the United States between 1960 and 1988.

Although the concept of power is central to the study of politics, there is no agreement as to what exactly power is. Power is often viewed negatively, as domination, though it is also the case that power is created by people acting in concert, in which case it can have positive effects. Making sense of this puzzle is one of the aims of this book, which provides the reader with a clear and coherent way of understanding the various forms and manifestations of power, and it does so by bringing together the most important and influential perspectives on power within the political and social sciences. From the Contents: Mark Haugaard and Kevin Ryan: Power in Social and Political Theory John Gledhill: Power in Political Anthropology Stewart Clegg: Foundations of Organizational Power Jill Vickers: Gendering Power: Feminist Approaches John A. Hall and Siniša Maleševic: The Political Sociology of Power Philip G. Cerny: Power and International Relations