Doty has served as the Director of the Erb Institute’s Corporate Political Responsibility Task Force since its launch in 2021. For 30 years, she has helped leading companies implement their business strategies, improve employee engagement and retain customers by aligning across functions and delivering on their commitments.
In a recent Expert Dialogue presented by the Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce at the Erb Institute, Daniella Ballou-Aares and Lauren Caplan of the Leadership Now Project discussed expected “democracy flashpoints” in the lead-up to the 2024 election cycle and what business leaders and board members can do now to prepare. The Leadership Now Project is a national membership organization of business and thought leaders committed to ensuring the United States has a strong democracy and economy.
During the dialogue, Ballou-Aares, Leadership Now Founder and CEO, and Caplan, its Managing Director & Head of Democracy-Aligned Investing, offered real-world examples of business leaders speaking up on issues that threaten democratic principles and structures. They also shared how businesses can use tools like the Erb Principles for Corporate Political Responsibility to decide when, if, and how to take action to support civic institutions.
Leadership Now and CPRT are working with business leaders to determine how and when to take non-partisan, principled action. “Democratic erosion is part of the risk landscape companies and investors are operating in,” Caplan said. “Weak political institutions put the business environment at risk. It’s not theoretical.”
In the edited excerpts from the Expert Dialogue that follow, Ballou-Aares and Caplan encourage business leaders to prepare now for potential upcoming democracy flashpoints.
Elizabeth Doty: What do you view as the most likely “democracy flashpoints” or scenarios in the coming six to nine months?
Ballou-Aares: We should be thinking about two key risk factors: First is the nature of how this 2024 election happens. While ultimately the 2020 election was resolved, we had January 6 and unfortunately, the risk factors have not gone away. At a state level, the risk of political violence and efforts to undermine elections through local election administrators could really test the system.
We should remember that 2024 is a big election year across the world, with elections in India, the European Union, and elsewhere. These elections are happening in the context of both AI and disinformation practices growing, along with the climate crisis and migration affecting many countries.
Some of the tactics to undermine U.S. democracy are shared among autocratically inclined leaders across countries. We all need to be sharing lessons around how to build a strong democracy and what it looks like to be effective in terms of standing up for democracy.
The second risk is this increasing climate of political retribution and use of legislation to intervene in business decision-making in ways that are related to specific agendas. The most significant case has been Disney in Florida, where there was a direct relationship between an action and speech of Disney and the response of the state legislature and the governor. Broader examples relate to, for instance, legislation seeking to prevent state treasurers from considering ESG factors in investments. This has created a climate where businesses may be concerned about statements or actions that relate to democracy itself, which may prevent them from preparing for what they might need to do in the case of a crisis.
We’ve been concerned because these benchmarks of global autocratic behavior span history and are unfortunately occurring a lot today. When you have that type of political retribution and narrative, if business doesn’t stand together against it, it invites more.
Doty: How do you see these flashpoints affecting business leaders? I’m hearing of hesitancy to react. Executives are being called out individually and don’t want to get in the headlines.
Ballou-Aares: Over the last five years, business has sometimes been called upon to be the “adults in the room” — to take a position on issues when government hasn’t been able to resolve them or when we’ve had toxic political rhetoric.
Many business leaders appreciate that we want a functional government because they can’t be the ones to solve all the problems. Some also are pulling back and deciding not to say anything. I think it is dangerous, frankly, to have a blanket perspective to “stay out of it.” It is overdue that companies become more strategic about which issues they engage with and how.
Caplan: The truth is that democratic erosion is part of the risk landscape companies and investors are operating in. So it really isn’t a choice anymore. Companies and investors are going to have to figure out the best way to engage.
Ballou-Aares: There are concrete places where business can weigh in on issues in a legitimate way. I’m eager to see more deliberate coalition-building around core democracy issues. For example, our members in Ohio — an incredible group of 50 well-respected business leaders — came out against Issue One, which sought to raise the voter threshold for constitutional amendments from 50% to 60%. They were able to say, “For our state to attract talent and operate effectively, we need citizens to be able to weigh in on policy.” They were ultimately part of a successful coalition that beat that ballot initiative.
Doty: How is Leadership Now helping leaders and boards prepare and what are some things people reading this could take advantage of?
Caplan: First, we’re continuing to build awareness and understanding about the link between U.S. political risks and the risks companies face, and the role companies can play. From looking outside the U.S., we know that as the fundamentals of democracy weaken, threats to businesses grow. We see our institutions in the U.S. facing multiple threats, whether it’s the increasing violence around elections, restrictive voting laws, or attempts to politicize certification of elections. Weak political institutions put the business environment at risk. It’s not theoretical.
Second, we’re focusing on providing tools to help companies manage political activities in a way that supports stable political institutions. We are working on a guide for companies and boards specifically around political risk in the U.S. and best practices. That’s building on all the great work that’s been done with the Erb Principles for CPR and the fact that decisions around corporate political activities are not always easy or straightforward.
Doty: How do you feel about investors and boards as a channel for raising awareness about corporate political responsibility?
Caplan: We’re trying to respond to that gap as well. The hope is that by making the link clear and leading companies through a process where they can map those risks, that’s also going to clarify the issue for boards and the investor community.
Right now, only 25% of boards tend to consider political risk at all. And a recent study on institutional investors from States United Democracy Center and Brookings Institute found that 90% of institutional investors believe threats to democracy in the U.S. are increasing, but only 30% of those investors think public companies are equipped to manage that risk.
Investors are a powerful lever. We want to show how investors can engage on these issues — so it’s a conversation in terms of what is going to most effectively address the risks being posed by the instability we see.
Doty: If you were a C-Suite executive, what would you do in the next three months for corporate political responsibility?
Caplan: It’s important to do something now, ahead of time: Put a process in place, look at your current political activities, make sure you understand where you are. Then take a look again at best practices. Make sure internally everyone is talking to each other when decisions are being made about political activities — so government affairs is talking to operations, to the risk group, to the sustainability team.
Also, think about opportunities for business impact. That includes reviewing your political activities, and it also may include identifying election risks and supporting democratic principles in the states where you operate; having a civic action plan and giving workers time off to vote; or supporting nonpartisan efforts to strengthen election infrastructure or longer-term systemic reform.
It’s both defensive and offensive, knowing how you’re going to deal with these decisions and thinking about what you can do to contribute to solutions.
Doty: Let’s imagine that actions over the coming year help build a new norm around corporate political responsibility and a clearer social contract for business. What would that look like?
Ballou-Aares: The idea of corporate political responsibility, which says you have a view on what your engagement and influence is, is good management. You should know what you’re doing and what impact it has on your markets.
Historically in many organizations, government affairs has been seen as a separate exercise that operates by different rules you wouldn’t apply to any other part of your business. This requires moving away from that thinking and instead recognizing the need to understand how we are engaging in political activities and the consequences, intended or unintended, of that engagement.
In 2021, Michael Porter and I wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review where we spoke about how sometimes business says they can’t influence the broader forces. But when businesses are focused and proactive and come together with clarity on the outcomes they seek, they’re often very effective.
Caplan: Across the board, businesses would be more intentional about the impact of their activities on the broader political institutions and broader political climate. We would have well-functioning political institutions where government is responsive and businesses weigh in when it makes sense but aren’t pulled in as much as they are now. It would include broader awareness that businesses are actors in broader society and aren’t operating in a vacuum.
Business leaders seeking resources on whether and when to weigh in on policy issues can consult the Erb Principles for Corporate Political Responsibility. See the CPRT website for additional information, and sign up for newsletter updates.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.