Political Voice
In shortfall: the V-Dem Institute estimates that about 74 percent of the world's population, around 6 billion people, now lives in autocracies. It puts global democracy back at 1978 levels.
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
Democratization is ultimately the work of citizens and states, and the autocratic consolidation that drives most of this shortfall lies beyond any proxy vote. The infrastructure of voice, however, is now corporate. Telecom operators comply with government internet shutdown orders across Africa, with only Vodafone and Orange even responding to researchers' inquiries and few operators publishing shutdown transparency reports. Platforms decide what civic speech circulates. An Alphabet algorithmic-disclosure proposal earned 56 percent support among shareholders other than Brin, Page and Schmidt. In democracies, corporate money is a documented distortion of voice. Public Citizen traced 50 million dollars since 2015 from donors including 81 of the Fortune 100 to state lawmakers sponsoring voter-suppression bills. Shareholder pressure has already moved 394 S&P 500 companies to disclose or restrict political spending, per the 2024 CPA-Zicklin Index, and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility's members filed 60 proposals in the 2025 proxy season seeking disclosure of corporate lobbying and election spending. If every listed platform, telecom and corporate donor treated civic voice as a core objective, the corporate half of the problem would largely resolve. That means resisting unlawful shutdowns, disclosing and aligning political spending, and designing information systems for democratic participation. The states that jail journalists and rig elections remain outside the lever, so owners supply a necessary input while citizens and governments must deliver democratization itself.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- V-Dem report finds global democracy is back at 1978 levels (Democracy Report 2026), Democracy Without Borders / V-Dem Institute, 2026-03-18
- Internet Shutdowns in Africa: Addressing the Human Rights Responsibilities of Telecommunication Companies, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 2022-03
- Through a Series of Shareholder Proposals at Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Investors Underscore Digital and Human Rights Risks in Tech Sector, Investor Alliance for Human Rights, 2023-01-31
- The Corporate Sponsors of Voter Suppression, Public Citizen, 2021-04-05
- 2024 CPA-Zicklin Index of Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (Center for Political Accountability), 2024-11-06
- Investors File 60 Proposals Calling for Transparency Around Corporate Political Activity, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2025-04-01
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Urges shareholders to support corporate political spending disclosure proposals and tracks their vote results, while pressing the SEC for a disclosure rule as a member of the Corporate Reform Coalition.
Shareholder resolutions for political disclosure enjoy significant support, Public Citizen, 2012-11
Coordinated members who filed 60 proposals in the 2025 proxy season seeking disclosure and oversight of corporate lobbying, election spending and climate lobbying alignment.
Filed the 2022 Alphabet proposal seeking disclosure of how its algorithmic systems target advertising and affect user speech.
Published with Access Now an investor briefing on internet shutdowns asking investors to press telecom and ICT companies to appoint a board-level officer for shutdown orders, adopt transparent policies for responding to and documenting orders, and report on shutdown requests.
Investors in tech companies at risk over internet shutdowns, Access Now, 2016-09
18 campaigns on record
The annual say-on-pay advisory vote asked shareholders to approve a $107 million compensation package for Comcast's co-CEOs for 2025, including a $35 million one-time stock grant to Co-CEO Michael Cavanagh tied to his promotion.
Result: Comcast's Class A shareholders voted about 32.83% in favor and 67.17% against at the June 10, 2026 annual meeting; overall company-wide say-on-pay support (including Class B votes) was 58.43%. This was the company's annual management-sponsored say-on-pay advisory vote, not a shareholder-filed resolution.
we found no documented change; the compensation structure remained in place because Comcast's dual-class voting structure gives Class B shares, controlled by the Roberts family, about one-third of total voting power regardless of the Class A result.
NLPC's proposal asked Comcast to separate the roles of CEO and board chair and appoint an independent chair, arguing that combining the roles under CEO Brian Roberts, who also controls a supermajority of votes through Class B shares, weakens board oversight.
Result: Received about 42.73% support among Class A shares at the June 2026 annual meeting.
we found no documented change; Comcast's dual-class structure means Class B shares (about one-third of total voting power, held by the Roberts family) can outweigh Class A shareholder sentiment regardless of the Class A vote share.
The proposal asked Elevance's board to commission an independent study on adopting a policy against corporate contributions to partisan 527 political organizations, after the company gave more than $9.7 million to the Republican Governors Association and $1.3 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association since 2010.
Result: Received about 8.7% support at the May 2026 annual meeting.
we found no documented change; Trillium described this first-year result as a basis for continued engagement.
Q2 2026 Shareholder Advocacy Impact Report, Trillium Asset Management
Asked the board to analyse and report to shareholders, at reasonable cost and omitting confidential information, on how JPMorgan Chase's lobbying and public policy advocacy align with its stated public policy positions, covering both direct lobbying and indirect advocacy through trade associations and politically active social welfare organizations, and the criteria used to judge alignment.
Result: Voted on as Proposal 6 at the annual meeting of 19 May 2026 and not approved: 254,439,951 votes for (13.20%), 1,646,771,508 against (85.41%), 26,916,849 abstaining (1.39%) and 356,294,369 broker non-votes. Support has fallen across the decade at this company: a 2023 proposal on the congruence of political and electioneering expenditures drew 31.61%, and American Banker reports that roughly the same proposal drew 29.5% in 2021.
We found no documented change to JPMorgan Chase's lobbying disclosure practices that any source we opened attributes to this vote. The board told shareholders that it already provides detailed disclosures about its lobbying activities, trade association memberships and oversight practices, so the report would add nothing meaningful and would incur unnecessary expense.
JPMorgan shareholders reject call for more lobbying disclosures, American Banker
Sixty shareholder proposals for the 2025 proxy season seeking fuller disclosure and stronger board oversight of corporate political activity: 32 on lobbying, 23 on political election spending, and five asking companies to assess whether their lobbying on climate issues is consistent with their stated climate goals.
Result: Eight resolutions were withdrawn after companies agreed to expanded disclosure, and six were heading to votes at annual meetings that spring. Early in the season Air Products challenged its lobbying resolution at the SEC and, breaking from past practice, the staff sided with the company and allowed the resolution to be omitted, which was followed by more than 13 further successful company challenges on similar arguments.
AbbVie added incrementally to its lobbying spending disclosure and did not renew membership in four trade associations, and Zevin Asset Management withdrew its resolution there after reaching an agreement. United Church Funds' dialogues with four companies also ended in withdrawals. Against that, the SEC's decision for Air Products reversed the staff's past practice on these resolutions and opened the way for more than 13 further exclusions in the same season.
Asked Netflix shareholders to vote against the re-election of every member of the Netflix board. Bowyer Research gave two reasons, the board's oversight of five years of share price performance that the firm said trailed competitors, and the firm's objections to some of the company's content decisions.
Result: Bowyer Research urged shareholders to vote against the whole board at the June 5, 2025 annual meeting. Director Jay Hoag received 71,428,414 votes for and 259,865,864 against, failing the company's majority voting standard, and tendered his resignation. The company's Form 8-K records both the vote and the resignation offer.
We found no documented change at Netflix that any source we retrieved attributes to this campaign. No source we retrieved links the vote against Jay Hoag to Bowyer Research's solicitation, and the campaign asked shareholders to vote against the whole board rather than against him in particular.
Shareholders were asked to re-approve Elon Musk's 2018 pay package, worth up to about $56 billion, after a Delaware court voided it, and separately to approve moving Tesla's legal home from Delaware to Texas.
Result: Shareholders approved restoring the pay package by a wide margin at the June 2024 annual meeting. This was a management-sponsored compensation ratification vote, not a shareholder-filed resolution.
we found no documented change beyond shareholders restoring the pay package and approving reincorporation in Texas; the underlying Delaware court ruling that the pay process was flawed was not itself reversed by the vote.
Elon Musk wins back his $44.9 billion Tesla pay package in shareholder vote, NPR
NLPC petitioned Comcast's board to adopt a policy requiring director candidates to disclose their personal charitable and political campaign contributions.
Result: Comcast successfully petitioned the SEC to exclude the proposal from its proxy statement; no shareholder vote occurred.
NLPC compiled and published campaign-contribution data on Comcast's director nominees itself, drawn from FEC records, in a proxy memo opposing all 10 director nominees; we found no documented change by Comcast to its own disclosure practices.
The resolution asked AT&T to publicly disclose how its political contributions align with the company's own stated public-policy priorities and sustainability goals.
Result: Withdrawn after AT&T agreed to As You Sow's request.
AT&T committed to publish data on how its political spending aligns with its stated positions. We could not confirm that this data has since appeared in the company's published political engagement reporting.
Provide quantitative and qualitative disclosure on its algorithmic systems, including ad targeting methods, error rates and effects on user speech and experience.
Result: 19 percent overall; 56 percent of independent shareholders
we found no documented change
Alphabet, Inc. Algorithm Disclosure (2022), Trillium Asset Management, 2022
Three families of proposals on access to medicines. Anti-competitive practices proposals, at AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Gilead and Pfizer, on whether stacking secondary and tertiary patents on existing drugs limits patient access. Lobbying alignment proposals, at Eli Lilly, Gilead and Johnson & Johnson, on whether lobbying matches stated access commitments. Public investment and access proposals, at Merck and Johnson & Johnson, on how government funding is reflected in access and pricing. Oxfam America separately asked Moderna and Pfizer to study transferring manufacturing technology and intellectual property so generic versions could be made in low- and middle-income countries.
With Legal & General Investment Management Ltd
Result: Of sixteen proposals filed, twelve survived the companies' challenges at the SEC and went to votes at spring 2022 annual meetings. Two proposals at Amgen, which the company did not challenge, were withdrawn by the proponents after agreements with the company, and similar public investment and access proposals at Pfizer and Moderna were filed and withdrawn by other proponents. Of the twelve votes, this pass established one: at Merck's annual meeting on May 24, 2022 the shareholder proposal on access to COVID-19 products drew 627,659,497 votes for and 1,117,396,234 against, with 47,149,071 abstentions and 323,364,405 broker non-votes, about 36 percent of the shares voted for and against.
The two Amgen proposals were withdrawn after the proponents reached agreements with Amgen. ICCR's release does not say what Amgen committed to, and no further documentation of that commitment was found.
The CPA-Zicklin Index scores companies on whether they disclose political spending, how they set internal rules on political contributions, and whether the board oversees that spending.
Result: The 2022 edition was the first to cover the full Russell 1000; 78% of S&P 500 companies fully or partially disclosed political spending or restricted at least one type of spending, and the average S&P 500 score rose 3% year over year.
More than half of S&P 500 companies had board-level oversight of political spending by 2022, according to the source, reflecting a trend of rising disclosure scores over the decade the index has run (since 2012).
The Teamsters asked shareholders to vote against McKesson's executive pay package, arguing the company had not held leadership accountable for its role in distributing opioids, and separately pushed to split the CEO and board-chair roles.
Result: McKesson's executive pay package received only 26.6 percent shareholder support in the 2018 vote, described at the time as one of the worst results among S&P 500 companies. This was a vote-no campaign against a management-sponsored say-on-pay proposal, not a shareholder-filed resolution.
McKesson cut CEO John Hammergren's total pay by about $1.95 million (roughly 10 percent) and said it would factor opioid-related compliance risk into future pay decisions; in 2021, after an $8.1 billion opioid settlement, the board also imposed a further $2.9 million discretionary reduction to CEO Brian Tyler's pay and cut a former CEO's payments by $780,000.
The resolutions asked each company to publish a detailed report on how fake news, election interference, hate speech, and (at Facebook) violent content were spreading on its platform, and on what the company was doing to enforce its own policies against them.
With New York State Common Retirement Fund, Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs, Baldwin Brothers Inc., Harrington Investments
Result: Facebook's content-governance proposal received about 30 percent support; a similar proposal at Alphabet received about 36 percent support.
We found no documented policy change that Facebook, Twitter, or Alphabet made specifically in response to these 2018 votes in the sources reviewed; proxy advisor ISS had recommended in favor, saying shareholders would benefit from more disclosure.
Arjuna Capital and NY State Ask Facebook to Explain Plans for Governing Content, Business Wire
Investors called on the Wells Fargo board to claw back pay from executives responsible for the bank's fake-accounts scandal and used the annual director election to signal accountability for oversight failures.
Result: Four of Wells Fargo's 15 directors, including then-chairman Stephen Sanger, received less than 60% shareholder support at the April 2017 annual meeting, far below the roughly 95% typical for uncontested directors. Mechanism: a vote-no / withhold campaign in the annual director election.
All twelve nominated directors were re-elected, several with unusually low support. We found no documented board change attributable to this vote. The board's clawback of pay from John Stumpf and Carrie Tolstedt happened in September 2016, seven months earlier, and was not a result of this vote.
The proposal asked Alphabet to recapitalize its share structure so that every share carries one vote, ending the dual-class structure that gives founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin outsized control.
With Boston Common Asset Management
Result: About 99.8% of Class A (non-founder) shares voted in favor, but because founder-controlled Class B super-voting shares are counted together with Class A shares, overall support was about 28.9%.
we found no documented change; Alphabet's dual-class structure remained in place because founders Page and Brin controlled over 51% of the vote while holding only about 11% of shares.
Alphabet Shareholders Overwhelmingly Support Equal Voting, CorpGov.net
Appoint a board-level officer responsible for shutdown orders, adopt transparent policies for responding to and documenting orders including efforts to resist them, and report on shutdown requests and human rights risks.
Result: not stated in source
Investors in tech companies at risk over internet shutdowns, Access Now, 2016-09
The campaign asked companies to adopt 'proxy access' bylaws letting a group of shareholders who together have owned at least 3% of the company's stock for three or more years nominate up to 25% of the board directly on the company's own proxy ballot.
Result: Proxy access proposals won majority support at several target companies (for example, 71% at Netflix and 49.9% at Chipotle in 2015); by 2016, 50 of the 72 companies targeted that year had agreed to adopt proxy access.
Multiple companies adopted proxy access bylaws as a direct result of the campaign, according to the source, though Netflix's board did not implement proxy access despite the 71% vote in its favor in 2015.
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Doughnut Economics's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.