Abstract
Through their sociopolitical activism, business leaders increasingly call for citizens to become more politically engaged in favor of a partisan position. This research develops and tests a framework that reveals that corporate sociopolitical activism can indeed elicit such political engagement but runs the risk of simultaneously inciting backlash from citizens who oppose the company’s envisioned political ends. Whereas politically congruent citizens perceive a company’s activism to be morally courageous and are thus inspired to support the company’s stance, politically incongruent citizens feel threatened by the company’s activism and become politically engaged in protection of their political identity. Companies may, however, succeed in increasing moral courage attributions without simultaneously affecting citizens’ political identity threat by acting as first movers in their activism. A series of experiments, including a stimulus sampling approach with 30 real cases of corporate sociopolitical activism, lend support for this framework. The results provide several implications for the political responsibilities of business leaders in contemporary democracies.
When, in June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade and thus allowed states to prohibit their citizens’ access to abortions, the public reaction was fierce. Not only private citizens but also corporations such as Disney, Salesforce, and JPMorgan Chase openly opposed the decision—with some vowing to cover travel costs for out-of-state abortions—firing up intense discussions on companies’ social media among those applauding and those opposing the companies’ political stances (Livni et al., 2022). Ten years earlier, Dan Cathy, as CEO of Chick-fil-A, made headlines when he publicly opposed same-sex marriage based on the corporation’s religious tradition, leading to significant backlash and calls for boycotts by liberal-leaning interest groups and individuals. Supporters of the stance, in sharp contrast, organized buycott events like the “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” to show their support for what was deemed a brave statement by Cathy. Over the years, Chick-fil-A distanced itself from the controversy (Valinsky, 2019), but both incidents remain notable examples of how corporate sociopolitical activism (CSA) can unfold in politicized reactions among citizens on both ends of the political spectrum.
CSA describes a nascent and increasingly common behavior of companies that take public positions on controversial sociopolitical issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, gun ownership, or immigration policy (Bhagwat et al., 2020; Cammarota et al., 2023; Nalick et al., 2016). 1 A burgeoning research stream examines the financial ramifications of CSA (Bhagwat et al., 2020; Mkrtchyan et al., 2024; Pasirayi et al., 2023), its impact on consumer behaviors (Hou & Poliquin, 2023; Hydock et al., 2020; Mukherjee & Althuizen, 2020), and how extant and prospective employees evaluate activist employers (Appels, 2023; Burbano, 2021; Wowak et al., 2022). However, CSA is accredited with objectives that go beyond such economic outcomes in that it pursues “the primary aims of visibly weighing in on the issue and influencing opinions in the espoused direction” (Hambrick & Wowak, 2021, p. 34). Providing some initial support for CSA’s efficacy in shaping political opinions, Chatterji and Toffel (2019) found that a statement attributed to Apple CEO Tim Cook on the risk of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people due to Indiana’s 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act reduced their participants’ endorsement of the law. An adjacent anticipated outcome of CSA is that citizens also become politically engaged to support the company’s espoused position in practice (Hambrick & Wowak, 2021; Nalick et al., 2016).
The efficacy of CSA in spurring such engagement is not only relevant for assessing the degree to which companies can realize this intended outcome but also for the normative evaluation of CSA (cf. Feix & Wernicke, 2024). CSA could mark a new milestone in the discussion surrounding the responsible leadership of corporations and especially their executives who act as “responsible citizens and statesmen” in representing the company’s endeavors to affect change in domains previously attributed to the realm of governments and other non-private actors (Maak et al., 2016, p. 465; Scherer et al., 2016; Voegtlin et al., 2012). Yet, whether CSA should be labeled reflective of such responsible leadership ultimately depends on its anticipated societal impact (Maak & Pless, 2006; Voegtlin et al., 2020). While some authors contend that CSA indeed reflects efforts to contribute to a better society (Eilert & Nappier Cherup, 2020; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021), others caution against such a favorable interpretation (Nyberg & Murray, 2023; Reich, 2020; Rhodes, 2021), especially considering the current scarcity of empirical evidence on any such impacts (Branicki et al., 2021; Feix & Wernicke, 2024). Acknowledging the current threats to democracies worldwide (Berman, 2021) and the simultaneous need for their vitality in addressing many other grand challenges facing humanity (Obydenkova & Paffenholz, 2021), this study on CSA’s impact on citizens’ political engagement—deemed “the elixir of life for democracy” (Barber, 2004; van Deth, 2014, p. 350)—provides such a piece of evidence.
Understanding this impact is complex, however, because the controversy of the sociopolitical issues addressed via CSA suggests a non-uniform and highly conditional effect of CSA on citizens’ cognitions and subsequent political engagement. While some literature acknowledges the potential of CSA to activate inspired stakeholders (Branicki et al., 2021), unanticipated backfire effects from CSA (and political identity cues more generally; Wooten & Rank-Christman, 2019), such as political engagement against the company’s envisioned ends, remain largely unaddressed. In the same vein, the psychological processes triggered by CSA might be very different depending on whether citizens do so from a mode of support or objection (e.g., Noor et al., 2019).
To resolve these puzzles, we derive and test a parallel mediation framework linking CSA to citizens’ political engagement. On the one hand, we hypothesize that, among politically congruent citizens, CSA evokes attributions of moral courage toward the company, that is, that the company “sticks its neck out” and is acting on principle in the face of potential risks to its performance or reputation (Hannah et al., 2011; Sekerka et al., 2009), which inspires these citizens to likewise strive for politically consistent behaviors. On the other hand, by posing a credible threat to politically incongruent citizens’ in-groups, corporate activists run the risk of simultaneously inciting antagonistic political engagement as these citizens seek to defend their political identities (Branscombe et al., 2000; Huddy, 2001; White & Argo, 2009). Figure 1 illustrates this main model. Based on this framework, we further hypothesize that by acting as a first mover on a specific sociopolitical issue, an activist company can increase attributions of moral courage and thus desirable citizen behaviors.
Graphical Representation of the Main Model.
Across a series of experiments, we find support for our framework. Applying a stimulus sampling approach (Wells & Windschitl, 1999), the first experiment examines how individuals react to 30 real-life CSA cases, establishing a link between CSA and individual political engagement via the proposed mechanisms. In our second experiment, we investigate the implications of being the first company to speak out on an issue and the political direction (i.e., liberal vs. conservative) of the corporate stance in a hypothetical scenario. We report two additional experiments in the Web Appendix that render consistent findings.
While extant research emphasizes CSA’s instrumental implications, we thus add to the comparably scarce evidence on its political impact (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019). Doing so contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding the political responsibilities of companies and their leaders (e.g., Maak et al., 2016; Scherer et al., 2016; Voegtlin et al., 2012) and provides empirical leverage for normative evaluations of CSA as more or less responsible along its societal ramifications (e.g., Feix & Wernicke, 2024; Nyberg & Murray, 2023; Rhodes, 2021). By highlighting a dual and highly contingent mechanism that connects CSA and citizens’ political engagement, we show that CSA is a double-edged sword not only for economic but also political outcomes.
CSA and Political Engagement
CSA has become increasingly common in recent years, making it a subject of keen interest to practitioners and scholars alike (e.g., Appels, 2024; Cammarota et al., 2023; Nalick et al., 2016). CSA refers to “a firm’s public demonstration (statements and/or actions) of support for or opposition to one side of a partisan sociopolitical issue” (Bhagwat et al., 2020, p. 1). To cite just a few prominent examples, Dick’s Sporting Goods has taken a position on gun control, Apple’s Tim Cook has advocated for LGBTQ+ rights, and Microsoft stated its support for the Deferred Action for Children Act and immigration. CSA is distinct from established non-market strategies (for thorough conceptual distinctions, see, e.g., Bhagwat et al., 2020; Nalick et al., 2016) in that it involves a valenced position in a public forum, often in the face of reputational and financial backlash (Bhagwat et al., 2020; Hydock et al., 2020; Mukherjee & Althuizen, 2020), that seeks to engender additional cooperation and support for one side of a partisan sociopolitical issue (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021). Contrary to established non-market strategies, the motives for CSA have hence been theorized to be not exclusively instrumental but, to a significant extent, political since corporate activists advocate for and aim to convince the public to become engaged on behalf of a partisan political cause (Hambrick & Wowak, 2021; Nalick et al., 2016). As such, CSA saliently plays out in and thus (intended or not) has the potential to affect the political domain (Branicki et al., 2021; Chatterji & Toffel, 2019).
Therefore, CSA also sparked a normative debate surrounding its implications for democratic societies (e.g., Feix & Wernicke, 2024; Nyberg & Murray, 2023; Rhodes, 2021), reemphasizing the need to understand corporate actors’ increasing responsibilities as not just economic but also political leaders (e.g., Maak et al., 2016; Miska & Mendenhall, 2018; Voegtlin et al., 2012). As recently conceptualized by Voegtlin and colleagues (2020), whether CSA should be deemed reflective of responsible leadership in the political arena depends, to some extent, on more instrumental outcomes, specifically, its impact on organizational performance and employees—outcomes that receive substantial scholarly attention (Cammarota et al., 2023). Yet, most importantly, responsible leadership requires companies to engage in “citizenship behaviors that seek to create long-term value for society,” that is, positively contribute to societal outcomes (e.g., Maak & Pless, 2006; Patzer et al., 2018; Voegtlin et al., 2020, p. 413). Indeed, this dimension also underlies the normative discussions in that some consider CSA reflective of such efforts toward positive societal change (Eilert & Nappier Cherup, 2020; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021), whereas others have raised concerns surrounding the democratic legitimacy of the political power that these corporations wield and CSA’s ultimate political impact (e.g., Nyberg & Murray, 2023; Reich, 2020; Rhodes, 2021). Yet, while e.g., Branicki and colleagues (2021, p. 283) hence write that empirically illuminating this impact “is not simply a matter of empirical curiosity but a question with implications for the very future of democracy,” very limited evidence on the political outcomes of CSA exists (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019).
In this article, we hence turn to CSA’s implications for citizens’ political engagement. As a micro-foundation of healthy democracies, citizen political engagement reflects an individual’s motivation to seek out and integrate political information in their daily lives unfolding in behavioral activation and, oftentimes, political action (Curtin & McGarty, 2016; Gibson & Cantijoch, 2013; Laurison, 2016). Political engagement can manifest in various ways: On the one hand, citizens may engage along more traditional trajectories such as by becoming more willing to interact with public officials, sign petitions, or participate in activism (Campbell & Wolbrecht, 2020; Gibson & Cantijoch, 2013; van Deth, 2014). On the other hand, citizens may seek to leverage their market power by engaging in political consumerism and preferring one product or brand over another for political reasons (Shah et al., 2007; Stolle et al., 2005). As illustrated by our introductory examples, ample anecdotal evidence exists particularly for the latter (i.e., politically motivated calls for boycotts and buycotts following CSA; Nalick et al., 2016). However, as we elaborate below, CSA has the potential to increase political engagement among the public more generally along distinct attributional processes that depend on the political congruence of the citizen and the activist position espoused in CSA.
How CSA Stimulates Political Engagement
We expect a partisan duality in the mediating processes linking CSA and political engagement. This is because attitudes toward the addressed sociopolitical issues bifurcate society into distinct social groups (Graham et al., 2009; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015) and individuals differ substantially in which attributions they dedicate to the behavior of members of an in-group versus an out-group (e.g., Foddy et al., 2009; Noor et al., 2019). In the focal context, we expect that those citizens whose political views are more congruent with those espoused in CSA will tend to attribute moral courage to the activist company as they perceive it to express laudable moral values despite concomitant reputational and financial risks. Citizens subsequently strive to emulate the courageous role model and thus become more politically engaged themselves. In contrast, those citizens whose political views are more incongruent with those displayed by the corporate activist will not view the company as pursuing a laudable cause. Instead, they will consider the company a threat to the values that their own political in-group upholds, likewise elevating their political engagement as an identity-protection mechanism. 2
We hence focus on attributions toward the corporation as opposed to, e.g., the CEO (or an alternative spokesperson). Importantly, this is not to obfuscate that the final decisions underlying CSA are typically made by companies’ executives and hence often affected by their idiosyncratic preferences (Hambrick & Wowak, 2021). Yet, as external stakeholders are rarely exposed to these corporate leaders directly they often attribute human characteristics, such as moral courage, to their companies and brands—with strong implications for their subsequent attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Aaker, 1997; Ashforth et al., 2020; Lievens & Highhouse, 2003). This is particularly relevant for CSA because the large majority of news coverage describes the firm rather than the CEO as the acting agent of a stance (Bhagwat et al., 2020). It is also consistent with theory and evidence that the average political leaning of non-CEO organizational members is most predictive of CSA and can even override the impetus of the idiosyncratic leaning of the CEO (Foss & Klein, 2023; Wowak & Busenbark, 2024).
CSA and Moral Courage Attributions
Discussions on the nature and importance of moral courage date back at least to ancient Greece with Plato describing it as a cardinal virtue (Pieper, 1990). Courageous acts based on moral principle are among the most lauded; such moral courage is perhaps the primary basis on which figures such as Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela are revered. Moral courage can also be displayed by the whistleblower who brings wrongdoing to light despite the possibility of retribution or a soldier who refuses an illegal order despite the threat of court-martial (Detert & Bruno, 2017). As these examples reveal, moral courage involves the act of “overcoming danger or risk to willingly uphold personal moral principles” (Hannah et al., 2011, p. 555). Conceptualizations generally contain three critical components. First, to display moral courage, one should have a clear set of principles that shapes one’s view of what is right or wrong. Second, there should be an awareness that acting on those principles may have negative consequences, whether reputational, material, or of another nature. Finally, moral courage contains an aspect of agency, in which one has a choice of whether or not to act with courage, and consciously chooses the action in keeping with one’s moral principles (Detert & Bruno, 2017; Hannah et al., 2011; Sekerka et al., 2009; Simola, 2015). It is “an inherently perceptual construct” (Detert & Bruno, 2017, p. 603), a somewhat malleable property ascribed to actors under the consideration of situational factors and social norms (Harbour & Kisfalvi, 2014; Schilpzand et al., 2015).
Moral courage has some precedence in the business literature, although research has, to date, mostly examined its relation to the actions of individuals or teams within organizations (e.g., Harbour & Kisfalvi, 2014; Peralta et al., 2021; Sekerka et al., 2009). These studies find that courageous leaders and other in-group members can be admirable even, or particularly, if their behavior is believed to be risky or unpopular (Hannah et al., 2011; Palanski et al., 2015; Schilpzand et al., 2015). We extend such research by focusing on attributions of moral courage to companies that are perceived to consciously behave based on moral principles, while they are aware of the objective danger involved in supporting those principles.
We contend that a company that engages in CSA may be viewed as having acted in a morally courageous way. CSA is aimed at influencing the creation of a new consensus on sociopolitical issues that are unsettled and often contentious (Nalick et al., 2016) and offers few financial incentives (Bedendo & Siming, 2021; Bhagwat et al., 2020; Pasirayi et al., 2023). Therefore, individuals may presume that the company is, at least in part, acting on moral principle as CSA “is so personal and so risky that a CEO [a company] must have at least a glimmer of inner conviction before taking such a stand, especially a vivid stand” (Hambrick & Wowak, 2021, p. 22). That a company makes a public pronouncement of its moral principles despite apparent financial and reputational risks is redolent of the notion of moral courage (Sekerka et al., 2009). However, we also contend that this association has a critical contingency. Any judgments about the moral courage of CSA must be viewed within the context of the observer’s political identity (Huddy, 2001) and the (in)congruence of a citizen’s political values and those construed in CSA. Since, as described above, moral courage differs from general courage in its distinct involvement of moral values (Detert & Bruno, 2017), only if the congruence of the company’s position and the citizen’s political views is sufficiently large, citizens will view the company as moral and pursuing a “socially worthy goal” despite the concomitant risk (Koerner, 2014; Schilpzand et al., 2015, p. 54). Politically incongruent citizens, vice versa, have a different understanding of what constitutes moral and, thus, morally courageous behavior (Graham et al., 2009; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015), leading them to attribute no or lower levels of moral courage to the same company. We therefore state,
As extant literature illustrates, displays of moral courage frequently inspire moral consistency among observers. Specifically, when salient actors demonstrate morally courageous behavior and signal that others should do the same, those others adopt scripts for morally consistent (and often courageous) behavior that guide their own decisions (Detert & Bruno, 2017; Gioia & Poole, 1984; Sekerka et al., 2009). For example, employees who witness superiors going beyond compliance despite apparent risks for doing so display stronger pro-social orientations in their own work domains (Hannah et al., 2011; Peralta et al., 2021). Thus, we contend that CSA can evoke increased political engagement to the degree it evokes moral courage attributions among politically congruent individuals. This yields the following moderated mediation:
CSA and Political Identity Threat Attributions
In contrast, when a company’s activism is incongruent with citizens’ political views, they may not only judge the actions of that company to be immoral (precluding moral courage attributions) but may see it as an attack by a political out-group against a political in-group (Huddy, 2001; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015). Individuals derive self-esteem from their political affiliations by establishing positive distinctiveness from out-groups (Hogg & Terry, 2000; Huddy, 2001; Tajfel, 1981). When an out-group openly attacks the morality of an in-group, individuals experience social identity threat (Branscombe et al., 2000; White & Argo, 2009; White et al., 2012), that is, the “subjective appraisal of an experience [or entity] as indicating potential harm to one of the individual’s identities” (Petriglieri, 2011, pp. 642–643).
In the case of CSA, citizens generalize a company’s position on a sociopolitical issue to its general political beliefs and subsequently position the company in a political camp (Chaney & Sanchez, 2018; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021). If that camp is opposite to the citizen’s own perceived or actual political membership, CSA may evoke political identity threat attributions as the individual’s political in-group is openly criticized by a member of an antagonistic political out-group. For example, showing corporate advertisements supporting stigmatized minority groups such as LGBTQ+ people or immigrants is associated with identity threat among highly conservative consumers (Chaney et al., 2019). Mirroring our arguments surrounding H1, we hence expect that a certain level of political incongruence must be surpassed for the focal attribution process to occur. Beyond this threshold, any additional degree of political incongruence will further increase the positive association of CSA and political identity threat attributions. We hence contend that:
Political identities constitute an integral element of one’s self-concept (Jost et al., 2009; Tajfel, 1981) and individuals often react fiercely to respective threats (Branscombe et al., 2000; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015; White et al., 2012). In these instances, individuals protect their identities to establish timely stability in their identities and a continuous level of self-regard (Petriglieri, 2011; Shamir, 1991). Especially when a threat is highly public, such as with media-intense CSA (Hambrick & Wowak, 2021), individuals are motivated to “bolster their own identity” and confirm their in-group’s righteousness (White et al., 2012, p. 716) as opposed to concealing or adapting it (Dalton & Huang, 2014; Petriglieri, 2011). Similarly, political identity threat, e.g., arising from changes in the societal appreciation of diversity or religion, has repeatedly been identified as a key motivator for citizens’ political engagement against the source of the threat (e.g., Campbell, 2006; Louis et al., 2010). We contend that for those citizens who consider the activist company a threat to their political identity (i.e., those whose political views are highly incongruent with the company’s espoused position), political engagement will serve as an identity-protection mechanism aimed to reduce imminent and future threats to their political identity. Thus,
A First-Mover Advantage for Corporate Activists
The above framework depicts a tension for activist companies in that CSA can evoke desirable political engagement via moral courage attributions while, simultaneously, risking backlash via political identity threat attributions. Yet, some cases of CSA might appear more morally courageous or threatening than others. Specifically, some companies engage in controversial issues early, while other companies take a more cautious approach, preferring to wait for others to publicly commit to a position first (Branicki et al., 2021), which Hambrick and Wowak (2021) refer to as first-mover and follower activism, respectively. To provide just one recent example, following the 2021 abortion ban in Texas, Match Group immediately and independently positioned itself against the legislation, while many other companies waited longer before committing to a similar position (Towey, 2021).
First-mover activism like the one displayed by Match Group tends to receive more public attention, “create a stir” that is focused on this particular company (Hambrick & Wowak, 2021, p. 38), and thus incorporate substantially higher financial risks than when a company follows other activists (Bhagwat et al., 2020; Branicki et al., 2021). First-movers’ willingness to face this increased exposure to risk directly factors into our model: From an observer’s perspective, it substantiates that the company is guided by its principles rather than the actions of others (cf. Appels, 2023; Mohliver et al., 2023). Such displays of individuation and moral ownership are associated with higher levels of moral courage (Hannah et al., 2011; Jennings et al., 2015). There is also some evidence from political science that first-mover activists are punished more severely but are subsequently more potent in inspiring others to publicly support the cause that the first movers initially championed (Lawrence, 2017). Thus, we expect that first-mover activism will generally elicit higher attributions of moral courage than follower activism, increasing the degree to which CSA can elicit favorable political engagement among citizens:
In contrast, our framework suggests that attributions of political identity threat are not primarily driven by the activist company’s exposure to risk but by the perceived effectiveness of an overall CSA campaign in derogating the values of individuals’ political in-groups. In this vein, a single first mover taking an antagonistic CSA position can be expected to be generally perceived as less identity-threatening than a company that adds its voice to a growing chorus. When first movers take a stand, they are, by definition, acting alone and thus have a relatively limited ability to influence a given sociopolitical issue. The danger that CSA may successfully alter the political domain becomes greater, however, as more companies become involved. This is because each additional company may have an incremental effect on public awareness and perhaps even on how political officials behave (Chatterji & Toffel, 2018). 3 Therefore,
Study 1
In our primary study, we test our theorized model using a large set of actual cases of CSA. Specifically, the experimental setup follows a stimulus sampling approach in which we make “use of multiple instances of a stimulus category” and test the same model across these instances (Highhouse, 2009; Wells & Windschitl, 1999, p. 1115). Such a design comes with a significant advantage: It accounts for the possibility that, especially given a nascent phenomenon and research stream, there may be nuances in the stimuli (different CSA cases or scenarios) argued to represent the same construct category (CSA) that affect downstream variables without researchers’ knowledge (Monin & Oppenheimer, 2014; Wells & Windschitl, 1999). In the context of CSA, Chatterji and Toffel (2019) already noted that extant cases vary, e.g., in the focal corporate activist or sociopolitical issue, such that conducting a study with a single case of CSA risks generalizing a finding that may be unique to that specific case and not applicable to the general category of CSA. Correspondingly, an effect that is found across multiple cases of CSA (and subsets thereof, see Web Appendix W6) strengthens the external validity of findings by lowering the likelihood that “[w]hat might be portrayed as a category effect could in fact be due to the unique characteristics of the stimulus selected to represent that category” (Highhouse, 2009; Unkelbach, 2016; Wells & Windschitl, 1999, p. 1116).
To construct our sample of CSA cases, we searched media reports over the period of 1990–2018 and recorded 30 real-world cases of CSA in which a company or corporate leader took a clear-cut stand for or against a particular sociopolitical issue and was prominently described as engaging in CSA in the media. 4 As a result, our vignettes comprise 30 cases of CSA by 26 companies between 1991 and 2018. The cases reflect a wide range of sociopolitical issues, namely, ethnic diversity, climate change, health care, migration, gun ownership, and LGBTQ+ rights. In 25 (5) of the 30 cases, companies took a liberal (conservative) stand reflecting the predominance of liberal CSA (Bhagwat et al., 2020; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021). Table 1 lists all CSA cases used in the study.
Overview of CSA Cases.
Procedure and Sampling
Participants were first randomly allocated to one of the 30 cases and read a short description of the corresponding company taken from the Bloomberg company profile. The respondents were then randomly assigned to the focal case’s CSA or control condition. The treatment (i.e., CSA) scenarios consisted of a description of the position taken by the company followed by information on the addressed sociopolitical issue (e.g., immigration) or incident (e.g., a law proposal) and a respective quote of a corporate spokesperson. The participants in the control condition received additional neutral company information matching the word count of the CSA description. Thus, for each case, participants in the control and treatment conditions received the same amount of information. Participants then answered a survey in which we measured our variables of interest. The full experimental setup is available in Web Appendix W1.
We initially invited 876 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) of whom 27.51% dropped out (typical attrition rates on MTurk “often exceed 30% [range: 31.9%–51%],” Aguinis et al., 2021, p. 826). Accordingly, the study was completed by 635 US-based respondents and represented a mix of genders (55.4% female, 44.4% male, and 0.2% other), age groups (M = 38.58, SD = 13.15), and political views (M = 3.99; SD = 1.88; 7-point liberal-conservative differential). Via the aforementioned random assignment, 310 (325) participants received a treatment (control) scenario with an average of 21 respondents per CSA case (see Table 1). The experiment was conducted in February 2020.
Measurement and Scale Evaluation
Individuals express their political engagement in somewhat idiosyncratic ways (Gibson & Cantijoch, 2013; van Deth, 2014). Therefore, we used four different measures: As our primary dependent variable, we asked participants whether they would like to be forwarded to a website at the end of the survey which allows its users to create or sign petitions for political causes—an increasingly popular form of political activism (Gibson & Cantijoch, 2013; Leonel et al., 2023; Stolle et al., 2005). We record their decision to be forwarded in the variable called “petition clickthrough.” 5 In addition, we incorporated established measures of political engagement by asking participants for their likelihood to engage in a set of political activities in the future such as writing to public officials or participating in a lawful demonstration (α = .88; e.g., Bode & Becker, 2018; Campbell & Wolbrecht, 2020; Gibson & Cantijoch, 2013); to engage in social, political, or environmental activism within the next 6 months (α = .94; Fielding et al., 2008); and to engage in political consumerism (α = .94; Shah et al., 2007; Stolle et al., 2005).
To measure moral courage attributions, we adapted 13 items of the professional moral courage scale by Sekerka and colleagues (2009) to the company context (α = .97). Due to the lack of established scales for political identity threat attributions, we constructed a scale composed of four items (α = .95) such as “the company is a threat to my political beliefs,” closely following the conceptualization of the construct in the literature (Branscombe et al., 2000; Huddy, 2001). 6
To reflect political incongruence, we measured and transformed participants’ political conservatism using the liberal-conservative semantic differential (Jost et al., 2009). For liberal CSA cases, the degree of political conservatism indicates how incongruent their political views are with the espoused company position. As five of our 30 CSA cases lean conservative, we reversed the measure for participants of these cases such that higher scores (i.e., liberalism) also indicate political incongruence with the activist company. As an alternative, issue-based measure for political incongruence, we applied Everett’s (2013) Social and Economic Conservatism Scale (SECS; α = .87) and also transformed it to reflect incongruence for all cases. 7
We further controlled for respondents’ prior familiarity with the company in a single item (Turban, 2001) as well as for their demographics. Participants completed two attention checks (88.2% and 87.2% passed, respectively). To control for idiosyncrasies of the individual CSA cases, we computed dummies for each case and sociopolitical issue as well as for cases reflecting CEO activism or cases that occurred prior to the U.S. 2016 elections.
All items applied 7-point Likert-type scales. The average variance extracted from the multi-item measures is higher than the highest squared correlation between the constructs, meeting the guideline of the Fornell-Larcker criterion for discriminant validity (Fornell & Larcker, 1981). Descriptive and correlational information can be found in Table 2. Web Appendix W2 provides additional information on the measures incorporated in this study.
Descriptive Statistics and Correlations.
Correlation is significant at the .05 level (two-tailed). **Correlation is significant at the .01 level (two-tailed).
Manipulation Checks
Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) confirm that participants in the treatment group were more likely to report that the focal “company took an activist stand in the past,” (Mtreatment = 4.52 versus Mcontrol = 3.85; F(1, 633) = 26.214, p < .01). Furthermore, they correctly extrapolated the company’s political position from the sociopolitical stand, that is, considered a company which issued a conservative statement more conservative, (Mconservative = 4.99 versus Mliberal = 3.72; F(1, 633) = 18.887, p < .01), and a company which issued a liberal statement more liberal, (Mconservative = 2.84 versus Mliberal = 4.36; F(1, 633) = 6.987, p < .01). Thus, our treatments worked as intended.
Hypothesis Testing
We compute logistic regressions for the dichotomous clickthrough variable and linear regressions for the item-based measures. We add fixed effects for the respective activism cases to control for potential unobserved case idiosyncrasies 8 and include demographic variables, participants’ familiarity with the firm, and attention check performance as covariates. We then compute indirect effects using the bootstrapping approach implemented in model 7 of the SPSS PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2018; Preacher & Hayes, 2008) 9 and compare indirect effects at the 16th percentile and the 84th percentile of the moderator, that is, at point 2 (reflecting more congruent participants) and point 6 (reflecting more incongruent participants), respectively, on the 7-point incongruence scale. 10 We report 95% confidence intervals for the indirect effects unless otherwise noted.
We find full support for our hypotheses. The interaction of our treatment variable and political incongruence negatively affects moral courage attributions (β = −.18, p < .01) while increasing political identity threat attributions (β = .27, p < .01). Following recent recommendations to provide graphs and confidence intervals for marginal effects in moderated relationships (Busenbark et al., 2022), we plot the effect of CSA on moral courage and political identity threat attributions, conditional on the level of political incongruence, in Figure 2, using the Johnson–Neyman output of the SPSS PROCESS macro. This also reveals the thresholds for each of the two attribution processes to become active: CSA evokes significant and positive levels of moral courage attributions when the political incongruence variable ranges between 1 (minimum) and 4.7. Vice versa, CSA evokes political identity threat attributions when the political incongruence variable ranges between 5.1 and 7 (maximum). None of our hypothesized attribution processes were triggered for participants that range in the 4.7 to 5.1 interval of our political incongruence measure. Accordingly, these moderate conservatives will not be incited into political engagement through the hypothesized processes. Overall, we thus find full support for H1 and H3.
Marginal Effects of the CSA Treatment in Study 1.
Both moral courage and political identity threat attributions are positively associated with our political engagement measures (for readability, please refer to Table 3 for the individual coefficients). Accordingly, for all our outcome variables, indirect effects are significant and positive for more congruent participants via moral courage attributions (petition clickthrough: β = .32 [.13; .66]; political engagement: β = .17 [.07; .29]; political activism: β = .23 [.11; .36]; political consumerism: β = .11 [.02; .21]) but not for more incongruent participants, who, in contrast, are incited into political engagement via political identity threat attributions (petition clickthrough: β = .14 [.02; .33]; political engagement: β = .20 [.04; .38]; political activism: β = .20 [.04; .38]; political consumerism: β = .24 [.05; .44]). The indices of moderated mediation are significant and point in the expected directions for the paths via both attributions of moral courage (petition clickthrough: β = −.07 [−.17; −.02]; political engagement: β = −.04 [−.08; −.01]; political activism: β = −.05 [−.10; −.02]; political consumerism: β = −.03 [−.06; −.01]) and of political identity threat (petition clickthrough: β = .07 [.02; .15]; political engagement: β = .10 [.04; .17]; political activism: β = .10 [.04; .17]; political consumerism: β = .12 [.05; .20]). Thus, we find full support for our main framework.
Regression Results Study 1.
Note. *p < .1; **p < .05; ***p < .01.
Additional Analyses and Experiment
In addition to the main analyses, we compute models with fixed effects for the different sociopolitical issues, instances of CEO versus corporate activism, and whether a case occurred prior to the 2016 U.S. elections. Furthermore, we replicate our results using the SECS as an issue-based measure of political (in)congruence and using multiple balanced samples of five randomly chosen liberal and the five conservative CSA cases to ensure that results are not biased by the predominance of liberal CSA cases. While our sample is well distributed along the liberal-conservative continuum (see Table 2), we also replicate our inferences in a random subsample that is fully stratified across the political spectrum.
Finally, we employed an additional experiment in which 303 participants revisited a single case—Levi Strauss & Co. calling for stronger gun regulation in 2018. In this additional experiment, we ensure that our results are not caused by the mere exposure to controversial sociopolitical issues and are consistent when using a larger sample size for a single case, an issue-specific measure of political incongruence, and additional covariates. The results of all additional analyses are consistent with our above inferences and available in Web Appendix W5 to W9.
Discussion
In this experiment, we find support for the hypothesized moderated parallel mediation using a stimulus sampling approach. For politically congruent citizens, CSA elicits moral courage attributions, thus increasing their political engagement. Politically incongruent citizens, in turn, do not attribute moral courage to the company but experience it as threatening to their political identity and thus become more politically engaged as well.
Study 2
Our second between-subjects experiment serves three primary purposes. First, we replicate our general framework in a more controlled setting by using a hypothetical company and CSA statement, thereby precluding pre-existing attitudes and knowledge structures, and allowing the same firm to take a neutral, liberal, or conservative stance on the same issue. In this vein, a potential shortcoming of Study 1 is that we do not manipulate the occurrence of the CSA cases but merely their salience. A hypothetical scenario overcomes this limitation. 11 Second, we test whether moral courage attributions arising from CSA evoke political engagement in favor of the activist company’s espoused position while political identity threat attributions foster antagonistic forms of engagement. Third, we investigate whether and how first-mover versus follower activism affects our downstream variables.
Procedure and Sampling
Respondents were introduced to a hypothetical company described as producing a line of juices and energy drinks. They received information about the introduction of a bathroom bill in the company’s home state limiting the use of bathrooms to individuals of the corresponding sex at birth. We manipulated whether the introduced company subsequently opposed (liberal CSA), supported (conservative CSA), or did not comment on (no CSA) this new law. In the liberal and conservative CSA vignettes, we further manipulated whether the company took a first-mover position by engaging in activism before or only after three other firms took a similar position.
We applied two different control (no CSA) conditions. In both conditions, the company did not comment on the new law. However, in one of the control conditions, three other companies took a position (while in the other condition they did not). This allowed us to observe whether the general mention of other activist companies influenced participants’ reactions toward the focal corporate activist. ANOVAs revealed that the two control groups did not differ significantly from one another along any of the models’ downstream variables such that, as the baseline for our subsequent analyses, we use a single dummy variable indicating that a participant received any one of the two control conditions.
Participants were randomly allocated to one of the six experimental conditions (see Web Appendix W10). Afterward, they filled out a survey, reporting their political engagement, attributions toward the introduced company, and their political views. Participants further completed an attention check (99.3% passed) as well as manipulation checks and reported their demographics at the end of the survey. We invited 318 U.S. citizens on Prolific Academic to take part in our study of whom 16 dropped out. Thus, our sample consists of 302 U.S. citizens reflecting a mix of gender (female: 49.7%, male: 50%, other: 0.3%), age (M = 37.7, SD = 13.3), and political orientation (M = 4.06, SD = 2.05; 7-point liberal-conservative differential). Ninety-nine (101) participants were allocated to the liberal (conservative) CSA treatment, of which 100 received the first-mover treatment, and 102 to a control setting. The experiment was conducted in March 2021.
Measurement and Scale Evaluation
We capture directional political engagement by asking for participants’ intentions to participate in liberal or conservative consumerism and activism. Consumerism intentions were measured using two items per political orientation which ask whether a participant would “support brands which advocate liberal (conservative) political positions by purchasing from them” and “actively choose products from brands that take a liberal (conservative) stance on political topics.” Activism intentions were captured with a single item per political orientation asking for participants’ intention to engage in political activism in favor of liberal (conservative) political causes within the next 6 months. We use the same measures as in Study 1 for attributions of moral courage (α = .96) and political identity threat (α = .94). We measure political conservatism along the liberal-conservative continuum (Jost et al., 2009) to reflect (in)congruence with a respective activist position. We ensure that the Fornell-Larcker criterion of discriminant validity (Fornell & Larcker, 1981) is met. More information about the measures applied in this study can be found in Table 2 and Web Appendix W2.
Manipulation Checks
Participants correctly extrapolated that the company “openly opposed the introduction of the bathroom bill” in the liberal condition (Mliberal = 5.35; Mconservative = 2.26; Mneutral = 1.62; F(2, 299) = 116.781, p < .01), openly supported it in the conservative condition, (Mliberal = 2.31; Mconservative = 5.65; Mneutral = 1.66; F(2, 299) = 140.999, p < .01), and remained neutral in the neutral conditions (Mliberal = 1.82; Mconservative = 1.90; Mneutral = 6.56; F(2, 299) = 391.987, p < .01). In the first-mover condition, participants correctly extrapolated that the company “became active on the introduction of the bathroom bill before other companies did” (Mfollow = 1.84; Mfirst = 6.28; F(1, 300) = 633.105, p < .01), and “took a leadership role in their stance” (Mfollow = 2.53; Mfirst = 6.17; F(1, 300) = 297.176, p < .01). We hence conclude that our treatments worked as intended.
Hypothesis Testing
As summarized in Table 4, we initially apply linear regressions for multi-item scales and ordered logistic (ologit) regressions for the single-item scales (see Web Appendix W11 for the ologit thresholds). We test for indirect effects using PROCESS model 8 and report 95% confidence intervals unless otherwise noted. 12 As in Study 1, indirect effects are compared at the 16th (point 2; more liberal participants) and 84th percentile (point 6; more conservative participants) of the liberal-conservative continuum to test the moderated associations. 13 We add a dummy indicating liberal respectively conservative CSA as the independent variable while controlling for the other CSA treatment such that effects are compared to the control condition.
Regression Results Study 2.
Note. *p < .1; **p < .05; ***p < .01.
Liberal CSA has a positive impact on moral courage attributions which is attenuated as participants’ conservatism rises (β = −.64, p < .01). Similarly, as their conservatism rises, participants report higher levels of political identity threat attributions following liberal CSA (β = .74, p < .01). Vice versa, the interaction of conservative CSA and conservatism predicts higher attributions of moral courage (β = .22, p < .05) and lower attributions of political identity threat (β = −.37, p < .01). Figure 3 illustrates the respective marginal effects and thresholds for which liberal/conservative CSA elicits attributions of moral courage or identity threat among more liberal/conservative participants. Overall, we find support for H1 and H3.
Marginal Effects of the CSA Treatments in Study 2.
As in Study 1, political identity threat attributions are, in general, positively associated with participants’ intentions for directional activism (conservative: β = .29, p < .01; liberal: β = .41, p < .01) and consumerism (conservative: β = .20, p < .01; liberal: β = .15, p < .01). Moral courage attributions are likewise positively associated with conservative activism (β = .38, p < .01), conservative consumerism (β = .24, p < .01), and liberal consumerism (β = .21, p < .01) but not with liberal activism intentions for which we only find directional support.
Among more liberal participants, liberal CSA increases liberal consumerism intentions to the degree the activist company is considered morally courageous (β = .25 [.08; .47]). The index of moderated mediation supports that this association is attenuated as conservatism rises (β = −.13 [−.23; −.04]). In contrast, more conservative participants intend to engage in conservative consumerism (β = .34 [.12; .63]) and activism (β = .46 [.21; .79]) to the degree they attribute political identity threat to the liberal corporate activist. The positive indices of moderated mediation for conservative consumerism (β = .14 [.04; .25]) and activism (β = .19 [.08; .31]) support that they, thus, differ significantly from the reactions of more liberal participants.
We do not find significant indirect effects of conservative CSA via moral courage attributions among more conservative participants. However, conservative CSA increases more liberal participants’ intentions for liberal consumerism (β = .28 [.08; .55]) and activism (β = .52 [.25; .90]) via political identity threat attributions. The respective indices of moderated mediation are significant (liberal consumerism: β = −.06 [−.12; −.01]; liberal activism: β = −.11 [−.20; −.04]). Yet, significant and positive indices of moderated mediation also suggest that, as their conservatism rises, participants become less unlikely (but still unlikely) to engage in conservative political engagement to the degree that they consider the conservative corporate activist morally courageous (conservative consumerism: β = .05 [.002; .12]; conservative activism: β = .06 [.01; .13]). As such, while the liberal CSA treatment increases political engagement on both sides of the political spectrum by evoking attributions of moral courage among more liberal and of political identity threat among more conservative participants, the conservative CSA treatment appears to primarily increase more liberal participants’ political engagement (to the degree it evokes political identity threat attributions). We hence find general support for our framework, though differences exist between liberal and conservative stances.
According to H5, activist companies that move on an issue first should evoke higher moral courage attributions and thus congruent political engagement among citizens. To test this hypothesis, we first subset the sample to only include the four CSA treatments since a company can only (not) act as a first mover in CSA if it engages in CSA. The resulting sample reflects a 2 (liberal vs. conservative CSA) × 2(follower vs. first-mover) matrix. In our analyses, we use the liberal CSA treatment as the baseline to investigate whether the ideological direction moderates the impact of first-mover CSA on the hypothesized processes. As we expect first-mover CSA to generally increase moral courage attributions regardless of participants’ political congruence, 14 we run a PROCESS model 8 in which we add the first-mover dummy as the independent variable, the political direction of CSA as the moderator, and the mediators and covariates as in previous analyses. We also add an interaction term of the conservative CSA dummy and participants’ conservatism as a covariate. Our results are robust to the inclusion or exclusion of this interaction term (see Table 5).
Regression Results Study 2—CSA Subset.
Note. *p < .1; **p < .05; ***p < .01.
First-mover CSA increases the extent to which moral courage is attributed to activist companies (β = 1.11, p <.01), but a conservative direction of CSA offsets this association (β = −.92, p < .05). Contrary to H6, the first-mover treatment has no significant impact on political identity threat attributions. Moral courage attributions are, in turn, positively associated with intentions for liberal (β = .22, p < .01) and conservative consumerism (β = .26, p < .01) as well as with conservative activism (β = .25, p < .10), albeit only to a marginal degree. For liberal CSA, we find positive indirect effects of first-mover CSA on liberal consumerism via moral courage attributions (β = .29 [.09; .55]). In contrast, we find no significant indirect effects for first-mover CSA among the conditions featuring conservative CSA and the indices of moderated mediation (liberal consumerism: β = −.24 [−.54; −.03]; conservative consumerism: β = −.20 [−.52; −.01], 90% confidence interval; conservative activism: β = −.16 [−.41; −.001], 90% confidence interval) underscore that being a first mover in CSA appears to primarily affect the impact of liberal but not of conservative CSA via the proposed mechanisms. Overall, we thus find support for H5 for liberal but not for conservative CSA and no support for H6.
Additional Analyses and Experiment
As in Study 1, we reran our regressions of Study 2 in a politically stratified subsample (see Web Appendix W13). Moreover, to ensure that the results of Study 2 are transferable to the findings in Study 1, we employed an additional single-factor experiment in which we manipulated first-mover CSA and measured political engagement along the outcome variables of Study 1. In this experiment, we replicate that, by increasing moral courage attributions, being a first mover in CSA increases participants’ propensity to visit the petition website and their political engagement along the three intentional measures. We also replicate the null effect on political identity threat attributions. The results are available in Web Appendix W14.
Discussion
Study 2 replicates and expands the findings of Study 1. While attributions of moral courage and political identity threat generally mediate the impact of CSA on political engagement, liberal (the predominant leaning of CSA; Bhagwat et al., 2020) rather than conservative CSA appears more effective in inciting political engagement via the hypothesized mechanisms. Moreover, engaging in first-mover activism can increase moral courage attributions and thus political engagement congruent with the position espoused in CSA, yet we find no evidence for a similar impact on attributions of political identity threat.
General Discussion
Businesses are often criticized for prioritizing sales and profitability over outcomes that can improve societal conditions (Sheth & Sisodia, 2005; Stephan et al., 2016; Tihanyi, 2020). In contrast, the leaders of activist companies typically claim motives of spurring political change and thus improving lives rather than companies’ bottom line (Appels, 2023; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021). Yet, it is unclear whether and how CSA can indeed live up to these motives and inspire political engagement among the public. The data from our experiments support that CSA encourages such political engagement to the degree it evokes either attributions of moral courage or political identity threat. Which path mediates is contingent on citizens’ political (in)congruence with the company’s activist position. Moreover, liberal CSA appears more potent in evoking political engagement along the hypothesized mechanisms and, in our experiments, first-mover activism amplified moral courage attributions but did not affect CSA’s impact on political identity threat. These findings have several implications for the debate on the responsibilities of corporate actors that assume political leadership in modern democracies.
Theoretical Implications
Our findings provide an important addendum to Chatterji and Toffel’s (2019) insight that the political opinions of those who disagree with an activist CEO’s position appear unaffected by CSA and only individuals that were already in favor of a given political position intensify their agreement. While, according to their study, opponents’ opinions on a given issue remain unphased by CSA, we find that their political engagement increases. This gives rise to the depiction of CSA as not only being ineffective in changing political attitudes in the desired direction among those that would still need convincing but, to the very contrary, as further strengthening this group’s intentions to defend their political position. Such backfire effects arising from political identity cues are poorly understood (Wooten & Rank-Christman, 2019) but, by illustrating the duality of attributions underlying favorable versus unfavorable citizen (and, possibly, other stakeholder) reactions, we provide a basis for scholars seeking not only to better understand the overall impact of CSA but also to identify contingencies, such as being a first mover in CSA, that may alleviate backfire effects.
Moreover, a growing body of research focuses on how corporations relate to formal political institutions as they, e.g., substitute governmental responsibilities (as conceptualized in political corporate social responsibility, e.g., Scherer & Palazzo, 2007, 2011) or attempt to influence governmental decision-making (as conceptualized in corporate political activity, e.g., Lenway et al., 2022). Whereas these literatures by and large focus on macrolevel outcomes such as the provision of public goods or legislative change, our findings illustrate how companies might also affect the micro-dimension of the political system via citizens’ political engagement. As such, our findings speak to Barley’s (2016, p. 7) question “[w]hat is the future of democracy in a world of organizations?” and the literature on the political responsibilities of corporate decision-makers (e.g., Maak et al., 2016; Miska & Mendenhall, 2018; Voegtlin et al., 2012). On the one hand, many scholars are critical of CSA which they see as another manifestation of a “hostile takeover of democracy” by ostensibly woke corporate leaders that wield substantial political power to set and shift political agendas, yet lack legitimacy as they are not democratically elected to do so (e.g., Reich, 2020; Rhodes, 2021, p. 83; Wright, 2023). Nyberg and Murray (2023) even warn of CSA as corporate populism in which corporate activists’ “inclusionary demands do not support inclusionary democracy” (p. 6) as they are frequently “constructing and reifying divisions in society, legitimizing de-politicization, and repressing representative democratic deliberations” (p. 1). While the findings by Chatterji and Toffel (2019) indeed suggest that CSA may reify divisions, our findings suggest that corporate activists are not silencing “citizens’ voices from public deliberation” (Nyberg & Murray, 2023, p. 4) but, to the very opposite, may incite citizens to be more politically engaged (to the degree their CSA evokes attributions of moral courage or political identity threat) and thus positively contribute to a cornerstone of a healthy democracy (Barber, 2004; Galston, 2001; Hooghe et al., 2014).
Importantly, this does not automatically imply that CSA is aligned with the premises of responsible leadership and its “essentially normative” requirements toward responsible corporate involvement in the political arena (Maak et al., 2016; Miska & Mendenhall, 2018, p. 118; Patzer et al., 2018). Applying Voegtlin and colleagues’ (2020) three-role model of (integrative) responsible leadership, past findings shed light on the expert and facilitator roles, that is, the responsibility to fulfill organizational performance goals and to motivate employees and care for their needs, respectively. CSA appears inconsistent with these two roles as it, on average, adversely affects both organizational performance (Bedendo & Siming, 2021; Bhagwat et al., 2020; Pasirayi et al., 2023) and employee motivation (Burbano, 2021). Our findings tie most closely to responsible leaders’ third and most defining role as citizens that seek to contribute societal goods (Voegtlin et al., 2020). We indeed show how CSA can positively contribute to citizens’ political engagement—a micro-foundation of democracy (cf. Barber, 2004; Hooghe et al., 2014; van Deth, 2014) and integral contributor to solving the grand challenges societies currently face (cf. Obydenkova & Paffenholz, 2021; Voegtlin et al., 2022). However, we also acknowledge the more critical voices that suggest CSA may be misused to favor instrumental or other private interests at the detriment of broader society (e.g., Branicki et al., 2021; Reich, 2020; Rhodes, 2021), which would jeopardize the depiction of CSA as reflective of responsible leadership across all three of its roles. While a complete normative analysis is beyond this article’s scope, we contribute a rare empirical piece to the large and immanent puzzle of how corporate activists do and how they should “use their power and influence to take on more active roles as global citizens” (Maak et al., 2016, p. 464).
Practical Implications
An oft-stated goal of CSA is to invite political engagement in favor of a political stance (Branicki et al., 2021; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021). Our findings suggest that, to do so, activist companies need to be perceived as behaving courageously themselves without appearing threatening to politically incongruent citizens’ identities. Yet, CSA, on average, triggers both attributions simultaneously and hence can incite support as well as backlash. Therefore, we urge corporate leaders to deliberate carefully before soliciting an activist stance, since even the first-mover advantage that we identify cannot fully compensate for the backfire effects described in the focal and previous research: CSA often impairs firm performance (Bedendo & Siming, 2021; Bhagwat et al., 2020; Pasirayi et al., 2023), deters key stakeholders (Burbano, 2021; Hydock et al., 2020; Mukherjee & Althuizen, 2020), decreases political diversity within the applicant pool (Appels, 2023), and, while it does not change their opinions (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019), it will embolden politically incongruent citizens to engage politically against the company’s envisioned ends (this research). As such, CSA seems unlikely to realize either of its ascribed economic or political ambitions.
Indeed, if CSA is ethically motivated and reflects efforts to contribute to society as argued by some (cf. Eilert & Nappier Cherup, 2020; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021), our findings suggest that the best means to support these goals may be to abstain from CSA. CSA might not just rally up the “wrong” side of the ideological spectrum but risks further inciting already heated political debates and potentially crowding out a political power that used to be wielded more exclusively by democratically elected governments and civil society organizations (Branicki et al., 2021; Reich, 2020; Rhodes, 2021). Without appropriate regulation, such an erosion of traditional power distributions in policymaking poses a risk not just to corporate but also to democratic well-being (cf. Rhodes, 2021). Accordingly, companies and especially their executive leaders need to adopt a thoughtful and transparent approach to CSA, considering the broader societal implications and ensuring that, while their activism must not align with everyone’s political views, it does align with democratic principles (cf. Feix & Wernicke, 2024). Vice versa, policymakers need to reckon with this new form of public influence of companies and assess how to react to and, possibly, regulate corporations’ engagement in CSA.
Limitations and Future Research
Our research is limited by its empirical approach. On the one hand, experiments are particularly recommended when the goal is to identify cognitive processes triggered by a novel phenomenon such as CSA since only the experimental manipulation allows for a causal identification of these cognitions’ trigger (Antonakis et al., 2010; Henshel, 1980; Podsakoff & Podsakoff, 2019). On the other hand, experiments’ ability to maximize internal validity is often considered to come at the cost of external validity, especially in survey-based settings (Lonati et al., 2018). Particular threats to external validity in our context arise from a potential lack of our vignette-based treatments’ representativeness of the class of manipulations they aim to represent (Highhouse, 2009) and the construct validity of the operationalizations of our dependent variables (Eifler & Petzold, 2019; Lonati et al., 2018).
We try to accommodate the first concern by following Highhouse (2009, p. 557) and others (e.g., Monin & Oppenheimer, 2014; Unkelbach, 2016; Wells & Windschitl, 1999) who argue that externally valid experimentation “requires stimulus sampling” and hence show the consistency of our results across over 30 real cases of CSA in Study 1 in addition to our more controlled settings (i.e., Study 2 and the two studies reported in the Web Appendix). Moreover, the public regularly learns about CSA in a vignette-like form in real life, namely, via newspaper articles or social media (Bhagwat et al., 2020; Hambrick & Wowak, 2021; Pasirayi et al., 2023). While we leveraged the cases’ variance to show that our effects hold across them and are hence applicable to the broader category of CSA, we invite future research to further unpack how “different shades of CSA” may affect political and other stakeholder reactions. Doing so could advance broader theoretical discussions as well. For example, little attention has been paid to potential differences in the impact of corporate and CEO activism (Cammarota et al., 2023), yet these differences may lend fruitful empirical settings to test recent theory on anthropomorphism and interpersonal versus organizational identification (Ashforth et al., 2016, 2020). We report the full vignettes of our studies and the effects of a few notable differences within our selection of cases (e.g., the stance’s timing, spokesperson, and sociopolitical issue) in the Web Appendix and hope this can serve as a starting point for such endeavors.
Regarding the second concern, we relied on established survey-based measures and a self-constructed behavioral proxy (choice to be forwarded to a political petition website) to holistically capture political engagement. Yet, we cannot observe whether participants truly engaged in consequential behaviors (e.g., sign a petition). That is, we concur with extant literature that, e.g., visiting a website is a necessary condition for signing petitions on such a website and that political engagement describes “attitudes or orientations, the fact of being engaged in or paying attention to politics” that typically unfold in observable behaviors (Fielding et al., 2008; Laurison, 2016, p. 685; Skitka & Bauman, 2008). However, we cannot rule out that behavioral manifestations of our measures (i.e., participatory engagement, cf. Gibson & Cantijoch, 2013; van Deth, 2014) are ultimately affected differently by the identified mechanisms which continues to limit our understanding of CSA’s realized societal impact and offers important avenues for future empirical research.
Another limitation pertains to our use of online samples, particularly MTurk in Study 1. While some scholars contend that “MTurk is a valid recruitment tool for psychological research on political ideology” in particular and that online samples are typically representative of the wider population in general (e.g., Clifford et al., 2015, p. 1; Keith et al., 2023; Landers & Behrend, 2015), other scholars have raised doubts about the data quality that can be obtained in such samples, especially in more recent years (e.g., Chmielewski & Kucker, 2020; Levay et al., 2016; Webb & Tangney, 2022). We closely followed the recommendations of scholars in identifying and remedying such quality concerns (e.g., via multiple attention and manipulation checks; Aguinis et al., 2021; Hauser et al., 2019; Paas et al., 2018) and report a series of additional analyses and experiments to scrutinize the uncovered associations. While we thus find consistent evidence across a total of four complementary studies, subsets of participants, and different analytical procedures, our findings still rely on samples from MTurk or Prolific (the latter of which is considered a more reliable source for large panels; Douglas et al., 2023) and we cannot rule out a bias resulting from the online context. Acknowledging that, particularly in the organizational sciences, results from more controlled and natural settings typically converge (Mitchell, 2012; Podsakoff & Podsakoff, 2019), an overarching call for future research hence pertains to conducting field studies that investigate (and expand) the identified mechanisms beyond experimentally induced experiences, online samples, and proxies for behaviors. 15
Relatedly, while this research identifies a link between a corporate actor that expresses its political views and the desire of citizens to express or protect theirs through political engagement, we do not examine the precise nature and duration of that involvement. For example, future research may try to determine whether political engagement is specific to the issue in which the company is active or whether it pulls citizens into issues not addressed by the company. 16 We generally need to empirically understand the quality of citizens’ engagement that is spurred by CSA. For example, is CSA indeed contributing to the democratic representation of citizens or are citizens instead “mobilized to support corporate interests that work against inclusionary representation in democratic processes” (Nyberg & Murray, 2023, p. 2)? In this vein, while we focus on the inciting impact of CSA, there may also be mitigating effects of CSA on the political engagement of (some) citizens—running in parallel or counter to the cognitive processes we identify—that could be addressed by future research.
Moreover, while we focus on citizens’ political congruence with a given case of CSA, other dispositions may inform individuals’ reactions to CSA. For example, CSA frequently touches upon religiously charged topics such as abortion (Nalick et al., 2016), raising the question of how political and religious views may reinforce or decouple one another in individuals’ reactions to CSA (cf. Swigart et al., 2020). There is also some evidence that stakeholders expect companies that present themselves as value-driven (as opposed to profit-driven) to engage in CSA and that these expectations moderate their interpretation of and reaction to a given stance (Korschun et al., 2019). Further research on the role of such pre-existing expectations toward activist companies appears warranted (see also Xu et al., 2024). Finally, CSA may yet intensify the blurring of responsibilities dedicated to the economic, political, and public sphere. Spurring on citizen interests was, thus far, neither expected from companies nor politicians but, at least primarily, nongovernmental organizations (Scherer et al., 2014, 2016; Scherer & Palazzo, 2011). Normative and positive scholars can equally contribute to further clarifying the desirability of corporations sweeping into yet another sphere of civil society.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-bas-10.1177_00076503241255691 – Supplemental material for Courageous Role Model or Threatening Villain: A Parallel Mediation Model of Corporate Activism and Citizen Political Engagement
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-bas-10.1177_00076503241255691 for Courageous Role Model or Threatening Villain: A Parallel Mediation Model of Corporate Activism and Citizen Political Engagement by Moritz Appels, Laura Marie Edinger-Schons and Daniel Korschun in Business & Society
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank associate editor Christian Voegtlin and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and developmental feedback. We dedicate this work to our co-author, Daniel Korschun, who passed away before the final version of this article was published. The project would not have been possible without him, and his passion for understanding the role of businesses in society will continue to inspire us. He will be deeply missed.
Correction (October 2024):
Acknowledgments and biography of co-author, Daniel, have been updated in the article since its online publication.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
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References
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