A Political Capability Approach to Corporate Power: A “Political” Political Theory of the Corporation

The recent political turn in theorizing the corporation has drawn attention to the extensive power that corporations possess, but has not yet provided a systematic normative account of corporate political power. This article proposes a “political capability approach” to address this. It identifies four forms of corporate political power: law-making, governance, discursive, and democratic will-shaping. The approach differentiates politically significant corporations from ordinary ones along two dimensions: vertically, by how many of these capabilities a corporation possesses in combination; and horizontally, by the scale and reach of each. Conventional metrics such as firm size or wealth are imperfect proxies for political power. The political capability approach instead connects normative evaluation directly to the concrete powers corporations exercise. It offers a more nuanced and empirically grounded basis for assessing which corporations warrant democratic justification, and for matching regulatory remedies to the specific capabilities that threaten democratic values.