Corporate Political Connections: A Multidisciplinary Review

Abstract

Corporate political connections (CPCs)—ties that firms forge with political actors—directly affect firms, political actors, and various stakeholders in societies. This topic has been studied extensively in multiple disciplines including management, economics and finance, political science, and sociology, with the management field contributing the largest number of publications. However, this body of research remains rather fragmented within the confines of each discipline or field, and synergies in theoretical and empirical domains remain underexploited. Differences between CPCs and other forms of corporate political activities are also often unclear. This paper develops a focused, comprehensive, and theoretically deep review of the rapidly growing but disparate literature on CPCs in multiple disciplines and fields, and distinguishes, compares, and connects multiple heterogeneous, theoretical perspectives that have been adopted in these different literatures. By conducting an extensive literature search of the articles published between 1990 and 2020 in 24 leading peer-reviewed journals in management, economics and finance, political science, and sociology, we build our review framework by organizing the reviewed articles into three groups of topics based on their logical connections: the conceptualization of CPCs, the antecedents of CPCs, and the outcomes of CPCs. Within each group, we distinguish two primary angles—the firm and the political actor—that correspond to the two entities joined by CPCs. Based on this framework, we identify major gaps in the management literature on CPCs and suggest avenues for future research by management scholars.

Keywords: corporate political connections

JEL Classification: G3, H7, M1