The political origins of corporate transparency: forging strange coalitions through information rules and policy entrepreneurship

Elizabeth Meehan

Review of International Political Economy, 2024, vol. 31, issue 5, 1396-1421

Abstract: When does business support corporate transparency laws, and how do they succeed despite opposition from other powerful business groups? Existing research converges on a common causal pathway: Crises increase public issue salience and open windows of opportunity for policy entrepreneurs to pressure politicians into adopting transparency laws. Examining the case of beneficial ownership transparency (BOT) laws, I theorize an alternative causal pathway where past policy decisions mandating information collection by certain industries produce inter-industry divergence in their policy preferences and undermine opposition business lobbying. Civil society groups can then engage in policy entrepreneurship to integrate supportive regulated industries into new coalitions. Large, organizationally diverse ‘strange coalitions’ increase political pressure on policymakers, leading to the adoption of corporate transparency laws. I conduct a structured, focused comparison of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia as parallel demonstrations of this causal pathway. I combine primary and secondary source documentation with 44 semi-structured interviews to trace failed and successful attempts to adopt BOT laws during the 2010s and early 2020s. I center endogenous feedback processes as a primary cause of transparency, provide further evidence of when firms prefer stronger regulation, and highlight the continued importance of domestic interests in transnational policy issues.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2024.2316077 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:rripxx:v:31:y:2024:i:5:p:1396-1421

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rrip20

DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2024.2316077

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Political Economy is currently edited by Gregory Chin, Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Kevin Gallagher, Ilene Grabel and Cornelia Woll

More articles in Review of International Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().