In recent years, a small number of activist shareholders have increasingly sought to use their equity stock holdings to exert influence over business management. Proponents of “shareholder democracy” have successfully pushed shareholder proposals offered for votes at the annual meetings of public corporations that change the manner in which directors are elected and in which shareholders can force corporate action outside those annual meetings. Proponents of “corporate social responsibility” have pushed companies to change their behavior with a clear interest in pursuing policy goals rather than share-price maximization. Critics of management’s pay levels have pushed for shareholder advisory votes on executive compensation—a practice borrowed from Britain but unheard of in the United States a decade ago—and such “say on pay” votes are now mandated under federal law by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

Academics and investors alike have debated shareholder activism generally and these proposals specifically; but to date, hard data have generally not been publicly available about this phenomenon. To fill in this informational gap and to uncover and analyze trends in this aspect of shareholder activism and its influence over corporate governance, the Manhattan Institute launched its Proxy Monitor project. The ProxyMonitor.org database assembles information on the 150 largest corporations (by revenues, as ranked by Fortune magazine) and currently includes searchable and sortable information on every shareholder proposal submitted at each company from 2008 through August 1, 2011. (Earlier years’ proposals, and a broader data set of companies, will be added to the database in the months ahead.)

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