Corporate Power and the Politics of Change

Over the past decade, corporations have moved beyond business to become influential political actors, shaping debates on climate, civil rights, ESG, and stakeholder governance. Corporate Power and the Politics of Change, an ECGI podcast series accompanying my Cambridge University Press book, features conversations with leading scholars exploring the growing role of corporations in politics, governance, and democratic life. I hope these conversations are as stimulating for you as they were for me. Happy listening!— Matteo Gatti

Corporate Power and the Politics of Change is a education podcast hosted by ECGI, with 10 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

ECGI hosts Corporate Power and the Politics of Change, a education show with 10 episodes published.

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  Corporate Power and the Politics of Change

  Dissecting the Architecture of Corporate Power with Elizabeth Pollman

  Aug 13, 202652 min

  What is a corporation? Where is it? Whom does it serve? And who, in the end, governs it? These are not abstract philosophical puzzles — they are the questions on which the entire architecture of corporate rights and accountability rests. Elizabeth Pollman has spent two decades building frameworks that answer them, and each framework has become a term of art the field now depends on: the derivative nature of corporate constitutional rights, the pro-business paradox, the corporate governance machine, and most recently, the engines of external governance. In this episode, host Matteo Gatti (Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School and author of Corporate Power and the Politics of Change ) traces Pollman's intellectual arc from corporate personhood through Citizens United, from the Supreme Court's treatment of multinational corporations through the rise and fall of ESG, and from the machine that converts social concerns into shareholder value to the nonprofits — left and right — that feed it from outside. The conversation ends where the hardest questions now live: in the uncharted governance territory of frontier AI. Elizabeth Pollman is the Perry Golkin Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-director of its Institute for Law and Economics, and a Research Member of ECGI. She is one of the most influential corporate law scholars of her generation. Matteo Gatti is Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, where he writes on corporate power, governance, and political economy. He is a Research Member of ECGI and the host of this podcast. Links Corporate Power and the Politics of Change by Matteo Gatti ( Cambridge University Press , 2025) Citizens Not United: The Lack of Stockholder Voluntariness in Corporate Political Speech by Elizabeth Pollman (119 Yale L.J. Online 53, 2009) The Derivative Nature of Corporate Constitutional Rights by Margaret M. Blair & Elizabeth Pollman (56 William & Mary Law Review 1673, 2015) The Supreme Court and the Pro-Business Paradox by Elizabeth Pollman (135 Harvard Law Review 220, 2021) The Corporate Governance Machine by Dorothy S. Lund & Elizabeth Pollman (121 Columbia Law Review 2563, 2021) The Making and Meaning of ESG by Elizabeth Pollman (14 Harv. Bus. L. Rev. 403, 2024) Engines of External Governance by Elizabeth Pollman & Mariana Pargendler (forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, 2027) Regulatory Entrepreneurship by Elizabeth Pollman & Jordan M. Barry (89 S. Cal. L. Rev. 383, 2017) Cases Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta , 594 U.S. 595 (2021) Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe , 593 U.S. 628 (2021) Trump v. Slaughter (2025) Related Podcasts Corporate Governing and Shareholder Voice with Jill Fisch and Tim Smith – ep. 3 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti Corporate Governing and the Role of Shareholder Primacy with Ann Lipton – ep. 4 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti After the Retreat: Can Corporate Activism Return? with Tom Lin and Aneil Kovvali - ep. 9 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti

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  Corporate Power and the Politics of Change

  After the Retreat: Can Corporate Activism Return? with Tom Lin and Aneil Kovvali

  Aug 13, 202633 min

  Corporate America spent a decade becoming an activist. It took sides on guns, climate, race, and voting rights. Some of it produced real change — the partial repeal of North Carolina's bathroom bill, the congressional ban on mandatory arbitration for sexual harassment claims, a federal Juneteenth holiday. Then, after the 2024 election, it stopped fast. The reversal was not strategic; it appeared panicked, poorly coordinated, and in many cases created new legal and governance problems that companies hadn't anticipated — DEI language scrubbed from filings in ways that generated fresh disclosure risks, commitments abandoned without assessing what was owed to the employees and investors who had been told these were core corporate values. In this episode, host Matteo Gatti (Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School and author of Corporate Power and the Politics of Change ) revisits the case for corporate activism with two scholars who helped build it. Tom Lin (Temple University's Beasley School of Law) is the author of The Capitalist and the Activist , the most thorough account we have of how corporations and activists have learned to work together. Aneil Kovvali (Benjamin Cardozo School of Law) argued in "Stark Choices for Corporate Reform" that voluntary corporate action and external regulation are complements, not substitutes. Both are now reckoning with what the retreat reveals — and whether the case they made still holds. Tom C.W. Lin is Professor of Law at Temple University's Beasley School of Law. He is the author of The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change (Stanford University Press), the leading scholarly account of how corporations and activist organisations interact and the conditions under which that relationship produces durable change. Aneil Kovvali is Associate Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His article "Stark Choices for Corporate Reform" argues that voluntary corporate action and external regulation are complements rather than substitutes. He is also working on a new project, Corporate Resistance, examining the extent to which and conditions under which corporations have resisted or cooperated with the second Trump administration's agenda. Matteo Gatti is Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, where he writes on corporate power, governance, and political economy. He is a Research Member of ECGI and the host of this podcast. Links Corporate Power and the Politics of Change by Matteo Gatti (Cambridge University Press 2025) The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change by Tom C.W. Lin ( Berrett-Koehler Publishers , 2022) Stark Choices for Corporate Reform by Aneil Kovvali 2022 ( Columbia Law Review, forthcoming ) Corporate Resistance by Aneil Kovvali The Miscalculation of Corporate DEI Risk by Veronica Root Martinez and Lisa Fairfax, 2026 (University of Pennsylvania Law Review , forthcoming ) Related Episodes Dissecting the DEI Reversal with Veronica Root Martinez – ep. 5 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti The Limits of Private Sector-led Reform with Mark Roe – ep. 6 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti Corporate Governing and Shareholder Voice with Jill Fisch and Tim Smith – ep. 3 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti Dissecting the Architecture of Corporate Power with Elizabeth Pollman – ep. 10 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti

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  Corporate Power and the Politics of Change

  Politics in Corporations: Systematic Corruption with Reilly Steel

  Jun 8, 202646 min

  Citigroup imposes gun purchase rules stricter than most state laws. Disney fights the Florida governor over legislation. Corporations, for a decade, decided they had something to say about politics. But something else has been happening in the opposite direction: Paramount's backers called the White House when competing for a merger approval. Palantir's CEO publicly embraced the current administration while his company's federal contracts expanded. This is not corporations shaping politics — it is politics shaping corporations, rewarding loyalty and manufacturing dependence. Reilly Steel's new paper "Systematic Corruption" maps the structural logic of that second dynamic. His argument is that what looks like political pressure on business is in fact a recognisable historical pattern — one that defined much of the early American republic and that earlier generations of reformers worked hard to dismantle. The conversation covers both the diagnosis and the reform toolkit, then turns to Steel's empirical work documenting the ideological transformation of American corporate elites over the past two decades — data that helps explain why corporations moved left on social issues, and what their recent retreat tells us about the limits of ideology as a driver of corporate behaviour. Reilly Steel is Associate Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he works at the intersection of corporate governance and political science. His article "Systematic Corruption" is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review. His empirical article "The Political Transformation of Corporate America, 2001–2022" was published in the American Political Science Review (2025). His article "Lobbying Against Enforcement" is forthcoming in the Yale Journal on Regulation. Matteo Gatti is Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, where he writes on corporate power, governance, and political economy. He is a Research Member of ECGI and the host of this podcast. Links: Systematic Corruption by Reilly Steel, Columbia Law Review (forthcoming) The Political Transformation of Corporate America, 2001–2022 by Reilly Steel, American Political Science Review (2025) Lobbying Against Enforcement by Reilly Steel, Yale Journal on Regulation (forthcoming) Separation of Parties, Not Powers by Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes, 119 Harvard Law Review 2311 (2006) Valuing Administrative Democracy by Brian Feinstein and Daniel Walters (2025) Corporate Power and the Politics of Change by Matteo Gatti, Cambridge University Press (2025) Other Episodes: The Economics of Corporate Governing with Swarnodeep Homroy and Elisabeth Kempf - EP. 2 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti Corporate Governing and the Role of Shareholder Primacy with Ann Lipton - EP. 4 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti

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  Corporate Power and the Politics of Change

  Reforming the Law of Capitalism with Katharina Pistor

  Jun 8, 202635 min

  What if decades of debate about capitalism have been conducted at the wrong level? Most critiques of markets focus on outcomes, inequality, environmental damage, stagnant wages, and most reform proposals reach for public law to fix them. Katharina Pistor's argument, developed in The Code of Capital and now extended in The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It, is that both the diagnosis and the cure have been misaimed. The outcomes are downstream of private law: the contracts, property rights, and corporate structures that code wealth upward while remaining largely invisible to democratic politics. Host Matteo Gatti brings his own thesis into direct dialogue with Pistor's. His book Corporate Power and the Politics of Change documents what happens when political gridlock pushes corporations into the governing role. Pistor's book goes one level deeper — asking why the legal system is built to concentrate private power in the first place, and why public law interventions keep failing to change that. The conversation moves from structural diagnosis through a series of concrete reform proposals, none of which require an act of Congress. Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School, a Fellow and Research Member of ECGI, and the author of the bestselling The Code of Capital (Princeton University Press) and The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It (Yale University Press). Matteo Gatti is Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, where he writes on corporate power, governance, and political economy. He is a Research Member of ECGI and the host of this podcast. Links: The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It by Katharina Pistor, Yale University Press (2025) The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor Princeton University Press (2019) Corporate Power and the Politics of Change by Matteo Gatti, Cambridge University Press (2025) Reconstituting the Code of Capital: could a progressive European code of private law help us reduce inequality and regain democratic control? by Martijn W. Hesselink, European Law Open (2022) Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 EU Directive 2004/25/EC on Takeover Bids EU Product Liability Directive, Council Directive 85/374/EEC Other Episodes: The Limits of Private Sector-led Reform with Mark Roe - EP. 6 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti

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  Corporate Power and the Politics of Change

  The Limits of Private Sector-led Reform with Mark Roe

  Jun 8, 202643 min

  For a moment in the 2010s, the stars seemed aligned. BlackRock, managing over $14 trillion in assets, was telling every major CEO on the planet that climate was an existential risk and corporations had to act. The Business Roundtable declared that shareholder primacy was over. Hundreds of companies updated their purpose statements, hired sustainability officers, and made public commitments. Then, in a matter of years, almost all of it reversed. Mark Roe's argument is that this was not bad luck or bad timing. The failure was written into the premise from the start. Host Matteo Gatti's book Corporate Power and the Politics of Change documents how corporations stepped into spaces governments had vacated. Roe's new paper explains why that private route was always going to be blocked: the same political forces that prevented Congress from acting on climate were lying in wait for the private route as well. The conversation traces this argument from Roe's foundational 1998 backlash thesis through his 2021 work on corporate purpose and competition, and into his new account of why shareholder-driven CSR failed — arriving, finally, at the hardest question: if the state won't act and the private route is blocked, where does that leave reformers? Mark Roe is the David Berg Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a Fellow of ECGI. Among the most influential corporate law scholars of his generation, his books — Strong Managers, Weak Owners (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Political Determinants of Corporate Governance (Oxford University Press, 2003) — established that politics, not legal rules alone, determines the shape of corporate governance across economies. His most recent book, Missing the Target: Why Stock Market Short-Termism Is Not the Problem (Oxford University Press, 2022), debunks one of the most durable narratives in corporate governance. His new article, "Why Shareholder-Driven Corporate Social Responsibility Failed," is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Matteo Gatti is Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, where he writes on corporate power, governance, and political economy. He is a Research Member of ECGI and the host of this podcast. Links: Why Shareholder-Driven Corporate Social Responsibility Failed by Mark Roe, University of Pennsylvania Law Review (forthcoming 2026) Corporate Purpose and Corporate Competition by Mark Roe, 99 Washington University Law Review 223 (2021) Backlash by Mark Roe, 98 Columbia Law Review 217 (1998) The Power of the Narrative in Corporate Lawmaking by Mark Roe and Roy Shapira, 11 Harvard Business Law Review 233 (2021) Missing the Target: Why Stock Market Short-Termism Is Not the Problem by Mark Roe, Oxford University Press, (2022) Strong Managers, Weak Owners: The Political Roots of American Corporate Finance by Mark Roe, Princeton University Press (1994) Political Determinants of Corporate Governance by Mark Roe, Oxford University Press, (2003) Corporate Power and the Politics of Change by Matteo Gatti, Cambridge University Press, (2025) Other Episodes: Reforming the Law of Capitalism with Katharina Pistor - EP. 7 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti

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