New from Bruce Freed, Karl Sandstrom, and Dan Carroll:

How has the Trump presidency impacted corporate political disclosure and accountability? The answer might come as a surprise. It’s been a boon and a boom.

Over the past four years, more large publicly held U.S. companies than ever before have adopted sound transparency and oversight practices for their political spending. This trend has strengthened between the 2016 presidential election and next month’s, according to the 2020 CPA-Zicklin Index released this month.

The annual benchmarking of the S&P 500 companies is conducted by the Center for Political Accountability and The Wharton School’s Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research. It rates the largest U.S. public companies for their political disclosure and accountability and includes these major findings:

• The number of companies with the best transparency and accountability policies, labeled Trendsetters for scores of 90 percent or higher, more than doubled to 79 this year from 35 in 2016. Five companies scored 100 percent. (The number of Trendsetters nearly tripled from 28 when the S&P 500 were first scored by the Index in 2015.)
• Companies adopting board oversight and a more detailed board committee review of political spending have increased 46 percent in the four-year period.
• Companies getting scores in the first tier (80 percent to 100 percent) totaled 156 this year, up two-thirds from 94 companies in 2016.
• For those companies that have stayed constant in the S&P 500 over recent years, there is steady improvement over time; their average score has risen from 46 percent in 2016 to 57.0 percent now—an increase of nearly 25 percent.