Sarah Haan writes that to understand American authoritarianism, it’s less useful to analyze the strategies of elected dictators around the globe than to look at how corporate leaders in the United States have rigged corporate democracy.
Six weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, experts are sounding the alarm for democracy. Trump quickly followed his inauguration with an attack on the bureaucratic state, threats to the rule of law, and the invitation of wealthy corporate leaders, most notably Elon Musk, to remake the government according to their interests. Two political scientists, Steven Levitsky of Harvard and Lucan Way of the University of Toronto, have been getting much-deserved attention for a thoughtful piece in Foreign Affairs that looks to elected dictators around the globe for clues about what Americans can expect after democratic breakdown. They argue that Trump’s return to the White House will bring “not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”
From the front lines of corporate capitalism, however, this assessment appears to miss something important: public and private governance are rapidly converging. The playbook for our current, anti-democratic turn in American politics comes from corporate governance, not authoritarian governments in far-off places like Hungary and Turkey. “Competitive authoritarianism” has another name in the United States.
It’s called “corporate democracy.” It is the way that all American corporations are governed.
Corporate leaders don’t inherit their positions or grab them by brute force. They are elected to them through processes that involve the formal hallmarks of political democracy: voting rights, expressive rights, and election administration. Corporate elections happen so frequently that corporate leaders are nearly always in an election cycle or preparing for one. Yet who would say that corporations are recognizably democratic? The democratic features of American corporate governance lie dormant in a system that mostly produces election victories for those already at the corporation’s helm. So tilted is the playing field that, in most corporate elections, no one bothers to run against the incumbents. Why run when you have no chance of winning? Overwhelmingly, corporations have the form but not the substance of democracy.
This is the model that Trump and his supporters want to transfer over to our politics. Instead of “competitive authoritarianism,” we should recognize this as “corporate authoritarianism.”
The purpose of corporate authoritarianism is to entrench a small group at the top of a high-value enterprise, where they can enjoy wealth and power and little practical accountability. To get there, corporate authoritarianism uses real elections that, while not technically rigged, are so skewed as to be virtually opponent-proof. Chief executive officers like Musk may have never served in public office, but they have spent years honing a particular set of anti-democratic skills.
Levitsky and Way’s work draws insights from the behavior of elected dictators around the world to predict the future path of American authoritarianism. In truth, there is a direct corporate analog for virtually all of the strategies they cite as common to political dictators. Just as elected autocratic governments weaponize departments of justice and tax agencies and use lawsuits to go after their critics, corporate leaders do this too.
Years ago, General Motors went after a critic, Ralph Nader, so aggressively that it publicly apologized. More recently, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and a supporter of climate solutions, has been a target of the fossil fuel industry. Last year, Exxon Mobil sued two of its own investors merely for requesting a shareholder vote on a climate-related issue. We shouldn’t mistake these as public relations moves; they are anti-democratic strategies designed to intimidate detractors and influence the outcome of corporate elections. And they are likely more familiar and inspiring to Trump than whatever Recep Erdoğan is doing in Turkey.
In short, if we’re looking for a roadmap for twenty-first-century authoritarianism, we should scrutinize the toolkit of strategies that corporate autocrats have developed for suppressing democracy inside their own organizations.
One of the signal ideas behind corporate authoritarianism is “shareholder passivity.” The idea is that voting in corporate elections lacks value and, since it also imposes costs, rational investors will voluntarily give up their voting power. In corporate governance, arguments in favor of shareholder passivity are generally dressed up with math and couched in terms of economic efficiency. The corporate authoritarian promotes a culture in which passivity is celebrated as virtuous and smart, and top-down decision-making happens naturally because the voters have rationally chosen it.
As corporate leaders move into government, we should expect them to push passive citizenship in politics. One Trump affiliate currently doing this is Curtis Yarvin, the self-styled political theorist, who recently told a New York Times reporter that he doesn’t bother to vote in political elections because voting is not important.
Another signal move of corporate authoritarians is to use granular control over the administration of elections to make it difficult and unpleasant to vote. Historically, this has been a critical strategy for corporate leaders because they often get to cast the ballots of voters who stay home through proxy voting. You can’t vote by proxy in a political election (yet), but corporate authoritarians are likely to have fewer qualms about suppressing voter turnout than regular elected officials.
In U.S. politics, elections are decentralized across thousands of independent jurisdictions, which protects them from autocratic control. Corporate elections, in contrast, are centralized and funded, planned, and operated by the corporation’s current leadership group. This has allowed corporate leaders to develop a whole range of vote-suppressing techniques, such as requiring tickets or pre-registration to vote (in addition to voter i.d.); moving corporate elections to obscure places that are difficult to reach; holding elections in tiny venues; forbidding shareholders who are also employees of the company from voting in person; and announcing election results before all the votes have been cast. Recently, members of Congress have expressed concern that Trump has sought greater control over the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to control the delivery and return of mail-in ballots. This is an important insight.
The fact is, corporate law has always tolerated a fair amount of manipulation in corporate elections; it insulates corporate leaders from responsibility with highly complex legal doctrines and a large corporate law bar. When business executives assume political leadership, we should expect them to devote considerable resources to making elections unpleasant and burdensome, and to building a loyal law department that wields legal complexity like a sword.
Unequal voting rules, in which some actors’ votes count more than others, also appeal to corporate autocrats. We have a formal commitment to one-person-one-vote in politics, of course, even if it only dates to the 1960s, but the electoral college system, used to elect the president, is not so constrained. Under the electoral college, the vote of a citizen of Wyoming counts more than the vote of someone in California, which explains why a candidate can win the popular vote but still lose the presidency.
Early corporate laws sometimes reduced the voting power of large shareholders, which evened the playing field across investors from different economic classes. This changed when the investment community settled on one-share-one-vote, accepting greater inequality in exchange for a rule that helped facilitate the growth of stock markets. But even that was short lived. By the end of the twentieth century, companies like Google were reviving unequal voting. This time, however, wealthy investors’ shares carry more votes than the shares of ordinary investors. “Dual-class” or “multi-class” stock structures are common today and, at some companies, are crucial for centralizing corporate power in a small group. Mark Zuckerberg is the de facto decision-maker at Meta, though he owns less than 14% of its stock, because his shares carry 10 votes each, while ordinary shares carry only one vote.
When tech company executives move into politics, we should expect them to explore greater inequality in voting, and to exploit existing inequalities. Political experts were caught off guard when Elon Musk used lotteries to get Americans in swing states to register to vote before the 2024 election. They should have anticipated that a corporate autocrat would game differences in voting power or experiment with vote buying. Vote buying is not per se illegal in corporate elections, where tight races can involve creative forms of exchange.
The history of American corporate democracy also suggests potential sources of democratic resilience. After two centuries of effort by corporate leaders to kill the democratic features of corporate governance, the heartbeat of democracy is still there. What accounts for this?
Beyond the strong cultural commitment that Americans feel for democracy, there is a history of individual investors standing up to corporate leaders. Corporate elections provide a venue for activist shareholders to confront and question a corporation’s leaders in front of an audience. This practice is an important accountability mechanism and an expressive outlet for dissent. In addition, free markets require the free flow of accurate information about corporate performance. Market actors reject misinformation, and securities markets don’t tolerate misleading statements by corporate leaders. Securities regulators prosecute them as fraud, and investors seek profits by trading on truth. If we are taking a lesson from the persistence of corporate democracy, we need to take truth-telling more seriously and look for ways to require it from political leaders as robustly as we do from public company leaders.
Author’s Disclosure: The authors reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
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