The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:32:56 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Corporations and Political Spending: A New Lobbying Focus in the 2012 Proxy Season – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Corporations and Political Spending: A New Lobbying Focus in the 2012 Proxy Season https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/03/10/corporations-and-political-spending-a-new-lobbying-focus-in-the-2012-proxy-season/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=corporations-and-political-spending-a-new-lobbying-focus-in-the-2012-proxy-season https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/03/10/corporations-and-political-spending-a-new-lobbying-focus-in-the-2012-proxy-season/#comments Sat, 10 Mar 2012 15:17:44 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=26655?d=20150113150856EST Posted by Scott Hirst, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on Saturday, March 10, 2012
Editor's Note:

The following post comes to us from Heidi Welsh, Executive Director of the Sustainable Investments Institute (Si2), and Julie Fox Gorte, Senior Vice President for Sustainable Investing at Pax World Funds. This post discusses a Si2/IRRC Institute report, “Corporate Governance of Political Expenditures: 2011 Benchmark Report on S&P 500 Companies,” available here. Work from the Program on Corporate Governance about corporate political spending includes Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides? by Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson, discussed on the Forum here. A committee of law professors co-chaired by Bebchuk and Jackson submitted a rulemaking petition to the SEC concerning corporate political spending; that petition is discussed here.

We are on the cusp of the 2012 spring corporate annual meeting season, where the headline issue is political spending in this election year. The primary focus for investor activists until now has been campaign spending, but this year investor activists also want more transparency about lobbying, in a big new development. This speaks to the allegations of undue corporate influence on politics and the economy raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Companies are providing more oversight and disclosure of their political spending, as we discuss below, but the investor appetite for more is huge, evidenced by both high votes on shareholder resolutions and the sheer number of proposals. Nine votes last year earned more than 40 percent support from investors, a highwater mark. And these resolutions now make up one-third of the approximately 350 social policy shareholder resolutions that have been filed for 2012, up from 23 percent of the total in 2011 and only 15 percent in 2010.

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