Corporate Coercion in Democratic Decisions

• In Event: Norms of Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Corporations are not people. However, people who own corporations have a disproportionate—and, we would argue, undemocratic—ability to influence public policy. Faced with the potentially limitless corporate capture of public policy-making, we argue, we must consider making substantial revisions to otherwise acceptable norms of public discourse.

Philosophers disagree on what democracy requires, but most agree that it involves a form of reason-giving among citizens. Reason-giving is supposed to mitigate, and therefore legitimize, state coercion. The fact that citizens freely deliberate about, or can accept, the reasons for our laws is said to make it permissible for the state to enforce those laws. More generally, public discourse is seen as respecting each and every one of us when the justification of public policies is not based on force, but on the “force of the better argument.”

However, this reason-giving requirement seems poorly equipped to deal with the ways in which corporations can capture public policy making. For example, when a major corporation announces that it will leave a city unless the taxpayers provide it with extraordinary benefits, the corporation appears to be offering citizens legitimate reasons. After all, citizens will avoid losing jobs, tax revenue, and prosperity if they vote in its favor. Yet is this fundamentally different from the gunman who offers to spare your life (or the lives of others) if you give him your money?

It seems clear enough that both the corporation and the gunman may be offering us what many have called the ‘wrong kind of reasons’ to go along with their offers. More specifically, corporations, like kidnappers, might engage in unjustified coercion in their efforts to shape public policy in their favor. Specifically, by threatening certain disproportionate and unnecessary economic consequences, they can tip the scales so that power, not argument, wins the day.

If corporate coercion were simply a problem for reason-giving theories, it wouldn’t be much of a concern. After all, there are other candidates for justifying democratic legitimacy on the table. However, the challenge of the corporate capture of public policy making runs much deeper. Many widely acceptable norms of public discourse do not rule out this kind of corporate coercion.

To take one more example, let’s briefly examine what is often taken to be public reasons’ main competitor, so-called ‘service’ conceptions of government. According to such a conception, the government’s duty is to help its citizens comply with what they have most, or best, reason to do. These approaches are somewhat more demanding than public reasons accounts because, while the latter only demand that policies be justifiable with respect to some reason that all can accept, a service conception demands that policies help agents comply with what they have most reason to do. Unfortunately, a service conception of government runs into the same problems of corporate coercion. In particular, if a corporation threatens massive economic disruption unless its favored policies are passed, citizens will have most reason to go along without a fight. In this way, even if we try to be more demanding of the sorts of justifications of public policy that we allow, the corporate capture of policy making may proceed unchecked.

While we should all agree that corporations offer the wrong kind of reasons to shape public policy, what is much less clear is what we can do about it. While much of our paper is spent outlining the ways in which traditional norms of public discourse fail to prevent the corporate capture of democratic governance, our ultimate conclusion is hopeful. Once we realize that corporate involvement in public policy making requires substantial revisions to our norms of public discourse, we can coalesce around policies and procedures that will limit the ability of corporations to dictate their preferred legislation. In particular, we will open ourselves us to the possibility that the role of government is not simply to enforce rules acceptable to our public or best reasons, but to ensure that certain reasons are never raised in public discourse in the first place.

Authors

• Athmeya Jayaram, University of California, San Diego

• Vishnu Sridharan, University of Southern California