Voice and power: Do institutional shareholders make use of their voting power?

Efrat Dressler

Journal of Corporate Finance, 2020, vol. 65, issue C

Abstract: I investigate the role of voting power – the ability to influence a vote's outcome – in the voting behavior of institutional shareholders. Using hand-collected data from Israel, an environment with concentrated ownership, I employ a power index borrowed from the political science literature to examine the voting power wielded by institutional shareholders and the voting patterns they display. I find that institutional shareholders' voting power is negatively related to their tendency to vote against management: the stronger the shareholder, the higher the probability they will vote in favor of a management-sponsored proposal. Based on evidence obtained here, this behavior is attributable to pre-vote negotiations as well as to the voting strategy of “counting on my vote not counting.” Next, I use detailed data on shareholders' votes to identify the channel through which a voting rule affects minority shareholder protection. I find that powerful institutional shareholders almost never use their voting power to vote against management, not even when signals of poor governance are discernible. I conclude that the effect of a voting rule on minority shareholder protection operates through proposal selection, rather than through direct voting.

Keywords: Corporate governance; Voting behavior; Voting power; Shareholder voting; Shareholder protection; Institutional shareholders; Expressive voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G23 G34 L51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0929119920301607
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:corfin:v:65:y:2020:i:c:s0929119920301607

DOI: 10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2020.101716

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Corporate Finance is currently edited by A. Poulsen and J. Netter

More articles in Journal of Corporate Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().