Citizen Inc. 2.0 : The Transition to Corporate Citizenship in Europe

In the last three decades, the democratic world has witnessed the steady rise of corporate political actions. In response, Western governments have taken actions to regulate the growing place of corporations in politics. By doing so, they also sanctioned the legitimacy of active corporate involvement in the policy-making process. In this paper, I argue that European countries are now at the forefront of this political revolution. I then compare the regulation of corporate lobbying, corporate donations and revolving-door practices in the EU, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. I show that national governments, as well as EU institutions, have regulated corporate political activities through a series of legislative, judicial and regulatory provisions. I also point out the fact that these governmental actions should be considered as significant steps in the construction of corporate citizenship, a concept which can be defined as the granting of formal citizenship rights to corporate organizations (or moral persons). In the end, the transition to corporate citizenship is a general process, but it appears that the legislative and/or regulatory actions that are the outcomes of this process remain embedded in each singular institutional environment.