Abstract The extent to which governments should intervene in state‐owned enterprises (SOEs), and the consequences of such intervention for firm performance, remain subjects of ongoing scholarly debate. Building on competing perspectives that view the state as either a strategist or a liability, we argue that the effects of state intervention depend on the government's political ideology and the dimension of performance considered. We test this argument using a quasi‐experimental difference‐in‐differences design and panel data from Polish SOEs. On average, the shift from a liberal to an interventionist regime was associated with significant gains in scale‐related performance, although not with improvements in profitability. Our panel regression results further show that these effects varied with the depth of state involvement in individual SOEs. State ownership and state‐appointed board members were positively associated with scale‐related performance following the regime shift, while the latter were also marginally negatively associated with profit‐based performance. Taken together, these findings suggest that the state may simultaneously function as a strategic driver of expansion and a liability for profitability, depending on the prevailing political ideology.
Tatarynowicz et al. (Tue,) studied this question.