Why do companies perceive a need to influence politics? What is political influence? How can companies obtain political influence? In this chapter, I answer all of those questions, drawing on research in several fields and on interviews with lobbyists, politicians, and others with first-hand experience with political influence. I explain that political influence is fundamentally about building and maintaining relationships with people in power. I argue that problem-solving is one way companies can form relationships, and I discuss common problems elected officials face: the need for money, the need for information, and the need to do their jobs well (or to be perceived as such). I conclude this chapter by discussing which influence-seeking strategies this implies, other than the strategies commonly studied, and discuss how this lends itself to questioning why companies choose different strategies.

This chapter asks whether companies are aware that consumers might support boycott in response to their political activities. I argue that larger companies, companies led by women, and companies with valuable brands are most likely to be vulnerable to backlash. Evidence for this chapter comes from two sources: corporate reports and interviews. Specifically, I use 10-Ks, reports that publicly traded companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and which are intended to provide stockholders and potential investors with relevant information about the company. Although women CEOs are rare, I find evidence that companies led by women are more likely to cite concerns about the kinds of issues that a public backlash can cause, as are larger companies. Further, I find evidence that suggests that companies are particularly worried about this with reference to brand and reputation damage rather than revenue. I supplement this with evidence from interviews with people with first-hand experience of corporate decision-making and find that companies are quite concerned about the risk of boycott and understand the threat inherent in their political influence-seeking.

In this chapter I ask why people respond negatively to corporate political advocacy. I argue that when people talk about boycotting a company, they are not really talking about their consumer behavior. Rather, calls for and supporting boycotts, especially in online formats, function in large part as a way for people to signal their partisanship to their social networks. In this way, disapproval of corporate advocacy in public serves dual functions of reaffirming someone’s individual partisan identity and also signaling loyalty to an in-group by disapproving of an out-group. I use two sources of evidence in this chapter: a survey with two embedded experiments and social media data on boycotts. The survey and experimental data use the individual as the unit of analysis to test whether disapproval of a company’s political activities is primarily partisan. The Twitter data focuses on what aspects of a tweet make it more likely to gain traction and be retweeted. In both tests, I find strong evidence that partisanship is a strong predictor of disapproving of a company’s political advocacy, as well as taking a public stance against it.

In the concluding chapter, I focus on synthesizing the findings from the book and addressing some lingering normative questions. Specifically, I ask what this means for boycotts, whether forcing political activity underground is really preferable to having it more out in the open, and what this means for if and how corporate influence can be tamed.

The introduction to this book surveys what we already know about political influence and explains why companies are and are not exactly like other organized political interests that try to influence politics. Companies differ from other organized interests in that they do not exist primarily to further policy objectives, and instead pursue policy objectives as a means to improving their business climate. Companies exist to sell things. This provides insights into how they go about seeking political influence because their audience is a group of people that may not agree with them politically. This chapter also discusses where political influence happens (i.e., anywhere there are governments) and provides an overview of the book.

In this chapter, I explain how fear of a public backlash shapes how companies engage in the political system. I outline a probabilistic chain of events that can lead from a company engaging in advocacy to being noticed and criticized by activists, to that criticism spurring a larger public response, to eventual damage to a company’s brand and reputation. Certain attributes of companies and advocacy strategies change the probability of each of these events happening, which means that (a) some companies are inherently more vulnerable than others and (b) companies can take intentional steps to reduce these probabilities in order to engage in advocacy while skirting damage. This chapter produces a set of expectations I test in the remainder of the book – that public backlash to corporate advocacy is a form of political speech and signaling rather than a statement about consumer behavior; that companies fear this backlash and “boycotts” primarily because of fear of brand damage, not necessarily sales; and that companies engage in particular strategies to either hide their political advocacy or defuse the public anger over it.

This chapter examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian contexts balance their professional responsibilities with their commitment to a political cause. It seeks to add to the existing literature on lawyers and social movements by offering a new comparative exploration of the relationship between cause lawyering and violent politically motivated movements and individuals. In particular, it considers how lawyers set the boundaries of their ‘professional project’ when managing relations with politically committed clients and collective movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work’, this chapter examines the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that are developed in such challenging contexts. To better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites, it offers three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers: (a) struggle lawyers, (b) human rights activists, and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community’. The chapter concludes by re‐examining the legitimating frameworks typically employed by each ideal type of lawyer.

What is the proper aim of socially punitive responses to wrongdoing? The usual contenders in the debates about the justification of criminal punishment – retributivist, utilitarian, expressivist, and communicative theories – all encounter problems as accounts of social punishment. This chapter argues that the general justifying aim of social punishment is to pressure wrongdoers to make amends for their own transgressions. The view combines both desert and instrumental conditions for punishment but develops distinctive accounts of each.

This chapter responds to the critiques of Linda Radzik’s account of social punishment offered by Christopher Bennett, George Sher, and Glen Pettigrove. In response to their objections, Radzik revises her definition of social punishment, draws a distinction between the justificandum and justificans of social punishment, and explores the problem of interpreting particular actions as punishments as opposed to protests.

This chapter explores the convergence of colonial political protests with the worlds of textile production and textile consumption. In the decades that preceded the American Revolution, Atlantic purchases of European-made silks and of Asian-made silks transported by European trading companies and merchants had reached new heights. But long-held sensibilities and systems were about to be thrown into disarray by the enveloping imperial crisis, with which the rapidly increasing American outlay on finished silks coincided. As fibres and fabrics accrued new moral and commercial values during the Age of Revolution, silk was initially selected as a salient, bellwether commodity inimical to republicanism. In the heated debates about dependency, representation, and identity that followed, the place of silk in American life and the potential of raw silk in an American economy would both be repositioned. Disrupted patterns of imperial consumption encouraged both the pursuit of new sites of raw silk production and the pursuit of new trade and manufacturing opportunities. These possessed a different character to the dutiful imperial projects that had preceded them, as once-separate colonies and colonists increasingly came together, and began to articulate homespun silken ambitions in new ways.

Chapter 11 examines Union de Vecinos, a group in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles that deployed a radical approach to fighting displacement: It directed its militant protest directly at art galleries, identified as the key culprits of gentrification. Alarmed by the negative publicity and the increasing inability to conduct normal business, gallery directors reached out to residents and activist groups. But the response was defiant, and in response some galleries closed. While the group had some success, it is too early to assess the overall impact of the strategy. Yet the approach merits examination because it is an innovative, ambitious, and analytically coherent response to the threat of displacement. The campaign questioned the role of cultural producers and experiential tools as it called for a radical approach to artistic practice, able to counter art's ties to a capitalist market. It also contributed to the debate on resistance against gentrification because of its harsh critique of the nonprofit sector, judged to be exceedingly accommodating and moderate in its demands.

Exactly seventy years after Mari Vagliano was accused of conspiracy to defraud the Russian Imperial state, Aristotle Onassis was accused of conspiracy to defraud the United States Government. Comparing the two cases is enlightening: both of these international businessmen had to surpass a variety of hurdles on their way to revolutionizing the global shipping business. It all started in late 1950 when CIA agents, backed by photographic evidence revealed that New York based Greek shipping tycoons were carrying cargoes on American-built ships not only for the United States and its allies, but also for its enemies, North Korea and China. The FBI launched its investigation, the government took aggressive tactics that resulted in ship forfeitures arrest warrants in the US ports while there was a worldwide boycott on Onassis ships and attack to his whaling fleet. From 1954-1956, Onassis and the other Greek shipowners took part in lengthy negotiations, reaching final settlements with the US government. The case is indicative of how national interests try to restrict global economic activities, using foreign businessmen as scapegoats for their internal political and economic problems.