Influencing Climate Change Policy

Abstract

Firms face a great deal of pressure to engage in the heightened debate about climate change policies and practices. Building on the corporate political strategy literature, the authors evaluate how firms choose to influence those policies when faced with pressure from shareholders and activists. The authors triangulate firms’ choice of corporate political activity (CPA) with their environmental performance to draw out whether performance affects the firm’s choice of engagement level in CPA. The authors find that firms in the S&P 500 use a form of constituency-building (CB) more often than a financial-incentive (FI) tactic and that environmental performance moderates this choice. To date, there is little research connecting corporate political activity and climate change policies and performance. This research is intended to contribute to this literature gap.