From the Financial Times. Sub-heading: “Companies are under pressure to speak out on a wide range of issues. Doing so while avoiding pitfalls will require them to rethink their approach to politics”

Companies are “shell-shocked by the frequency of need and the ballooning requests to engage”, says Doty, who is director of the corporate political responsibility task force at the Erb Institute, University of Michigan.

The perils of responding are not to be underestimated, as US executives found last summer when Republicans including Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, accused them of being overly “woke” — and told them to stay out of politics. Other dangers range from investor anger and consumer backlashes to employee disaffection.

“The trouble is, this is coming hard and fast,” says Lucy Parker, who founded the business and society practice at Brunswick, the public relations firm. “These kinds of questions weren’t on the radar screen five years ago and they’re now hurtling towards you.”
While speaking out is risky, so is holding back….

Closer to home, companies are being pushed on all fronts to become more vocal on a wide range of complex social, political and moral issues. When we asked FT Moral Money readers whether they felt more pressure for their organisations to take a stand, the response was a resounding “yes” (fewer than 4 per cent said no). When asked about the risk of backlash for speaking out, one reader said they had “received more backlash from employees for not speaking out”….

Investors are making new demands, particularly about corporate political spending. In January, for example, the $280bn New York State Common Retirement Fund filed shareholder proposals with eight companies, asking them to disclose their political spending….

Political spending and lobbying, often through political action committees or companies’ business associations, are not huge budget-line items individually. Collectively, however, they are a powerful source of influence. “In aggregate, corporate funding is the largest source of capital in the [US] political system,” says Daniella Ballou-Aares, chief executive of the Leadership Now Project, a business coalition that focuses on fixing US democracy….

Given the risks, Freed’s CPA is urging companies to do better at disclosing, overseeing and assessing the impact of their political spending. Its CPA-Zicklin index benchmarks S&P 500 companies’ political disclosure and accountability policies and Freed is talking to several of them about adopting a related code of conduct that goes beyond existing disclosure policies to include broader societal and democracy-related responsibilities.