Law-abiding firms often attempt to conceal their corporate political activity (CPA), yet the concealment of CPA has not been matched by our understanding of the phenomenon. We develop a theoretical framework consisting of three components to analyze firms’ strategy of CPA concealment. First, we provide a detailed conceptual background on CPA concealment, including what concealment of CPA is and how it can occur. Second, we develop an in-depth analysis of the key benefits and costs of concealing CPA for firms. Finally, we integrate this analysis with positive political theory to place our firm-level calculus in the context of policymaking by identifying the public policymakers whom firms are most likely to influence via CPA concealment. Based on this framework, we generate additional empirically testable propositions on how CPA concealment changes with factors at the country, institution, issue, and firm levels. This study is the first to generate systematic theory on firms’ CPA concealment strategies. Moreover, this research context highlights the particular importance of theory for investigating consequential phenomena that yield scarce data – it is theory which guides data discovery ex ante, helps assess bias ex post, and uncovers key insights that empirical analysis alone cannot generate.

中文翻译：

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经验黑暗中的理论之光：照亮公司政治活动的战略隐瞒

守法公司经常试图隐瞒他们的企业政治活动（CPA），但我们对这种现象的理解与CPA的隐瞒并不相符。我们开发了一个由三个部分组成的理论框架来分析公司隐瞒注册会计师的策略。首先，我们提供了关于 CPA 隐藏的详细概念背景，包括 CPA 的隐藏是什么以及它是如何发生的。其次，我们对隐瞒 CPA 的公司的主要收益和成本进行了深入分析。最后，我们将这一分析与积极的政治理论相结合，通过识别公司最有可能通过隐瞒注册会计师影响的公共政策制定者，将我们的公司层面的演算置于政策制定的背景下。基于这个框架，我们针对 CPA 隐瞒如何随着国家、机构、问题和公司层面的因素而变化，产生了额外的可实证检验的命题。本研究首次对企业的注册会计师隐瞒策略产生了系统的理论。此外，该研究背景强调了理论对于调查产生稀缺数据的后果现象的特殊重要性——理论指导数据发现事前，帮助事后评估偏见，并揭示仅凭经验分析无法产生的关键见解。