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. Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:32:10 +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 Responding to Objections to Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending (3): The Claim that Political Spending is Good for Shareholders – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Responding to Objections to Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending (3): The Claim that Political Spending is Good for Shareholders https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/04/15/responding-to-objections-to-shining-light-on-corporate-political-spending-3-the-claim-that-political-spending-is-good-for-shareholders/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=responding-to-objections-to-shining-light-on-corporate-political-spending-3-the-claim-that-political-spending-is-good-for-shareholders https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/04/15/responding-to-objections-to-shining-light-on-corporate-political-spending-3-the-claim-that-political-spending-is-good-for-shareholders/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:45:12 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=43574?d=20150105102445EST Posted by Lucian Bebchuk, Harvard Law School, and Robert J. Jackson, Jr., Columbia Law School, on Monday, April 15, 2013
Editor's Note:

Lucian Bebchuk is Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School. Robert J. Jackson, Jr. is Associate Professor of Law and Milton Handler Fellow at Columbia Law School. Bebchuk and Jackson served as co-chairs of the Committee on Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending, which filed a rulemaking petition requesting that the SEC require all public companies to disclose their political spending, discussed on the Forum here. Bebchuk and Jackson are also co-authors of Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides? and Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, coming out this month in the Georgetown Law Journal. This post is the third in a series of posts, based on the Shining Light article, in which Bebchuk and Jackson respond to objections to an SEC rule requiring disclosure of corporate political spending; the full series of posts is available here.

The SEC is expected to consider a rulemaking petition requesting that the SEC develop rules requiring that public companies disclose their spending on politics. The petition has received significant support—including nearly half a million comment letters urging the SEC to act as advocated by the petition—but has also attracted opponents. In our article Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending and in this post series, we respond to each of the objections that opponents of the petition have raised.

In our first two posts (available here and here), we explained why opponents’ claims that corporate spending on politics is immaterial to investors, and that disclosure in this area would empower special interest investors, provide no basis for opposing rules requiring public companies to disclose their political spending. In this post, we focus on a third objection that opponents of these rules have raised: the claim that political spending is good for shareholders—and that disclosure will discourage directors and executives from engaging in spending on politics that would be beneficial for investors.

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