Policymaker Responses to CEO Activism
通过对514名地方民选官员的实验，研究CEO在警察改革等争议性社会议题上的激进主义如何影响政策制定者的观点和互动意愿，发现CEO立场会降低官员的接触意愿，但不会改变其政策观点。
CEOs increasingly engage in activism on controversial social and political issues, such as police reform, LGBTQ+ rights, and gun control, to influence the behavior of policymakers. We run an experiment on 514 local elected politicians to examine how revealing information about CEO activism on police reform affects the views of policymakers. Additionally, we examine how CEOs’ controversial positions on social issues affect politicians’ willingness to privately meet with CEOs or publicly advocate for their businesses. We do not find that revealing CEO support for specific police reform policies affects policymakers’ opinions. Policymakers, however, are much less willing to engage—either privately or publicly—with CEOs who take controversial positions on social issues. These results do not vary with local economic conditions or the salience of police reform, but they appear to be driven by policymakers’ personal ideological commitments. Our results suggest that CEO activism may have limited influence on local politicians, at least on the topic of police reform, and they underscore the business costs of CEOs taking political positions. We discuss the implications for CEOs and the activist groups that often pressure them to take public positions on controversial issues. Funding: This work was funded by the UCLA Anderson School of Management and University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18282 .