Voting on Public Goods: Citizens vs Shareholders

We study the interplay between a “one person-one vote” political system and a “one share-one vote” corporate governance regime. If shareholders push firms for more prosocial policies, political backlash may arise, undoing these initiatives. If public policy is frictionless, shareholder democracy becomes irrelevant: the political system fully offsets shareholder influence. With public policy frictions, prosocial corporations can mitigate regulatory shortcomings and enhance corporate public goods provision. Nevertheless, shareholder democracy can hurt citizens due to the representation problem: it favors the preferences of the wealthy. Investor diversification, pass-through voting, and corporate greenwashing have important implications for these trade-offs of shareholder democracy.