Corporate Political Activism amidst institutional decline: an empirical exploration

Academic work on corporate political activism (CPA) has blossomed over the years. CPA, as a core non-market strategy, can be understood as the repertoire of political activities sponsored by corporations to secure their interests beyond economic competition in markets. CPA includes the different tactics employed by corporations that grant social and political decisions favorable to them (Luo et al., 2017).

Using a qualitative inductive approach our project seeks to analyze the factors influencing CPA change. Our analysis allows us to infer a theoretical contribution that we name as CPA dynamics which, moving beyond static views on CPA, rather seek to understand how and why they evolve over time. Moving away from the ordinary Western-centric and quantitative analyses on CPA, we elaborate our contribution on the institutional setting of Peru. Amidst a geopolitical realignment that is pushing Latin America towards populism, Peru stands out as a case of growing political instability that companies have to navigate politically. The country is currently facing enduring institutional crises of different sorts, experiencing major political scandals and a structural corruption that permeates across all institutions. Currently, a governmental coalition holds record-low levels of popular support (under 10% as per recent polls). Our hypothesis reveals that CPA has had to evolve to the next context and we plan to lay out the different features of this new type of activism.

In this project which started in 2023 we combine archival work with empirical research that departs from qualitative analysis of the narratives made around the behavior of the Peruvian corporate elite. This far, the project has been presented at an AMJ Paper Development Seminar and at the SASE conference. In this new stage we seek to further the analysis and move forward with the project by seeking research assistance to intensify pending work on data collection, transcription, coding and archival research.