Corporate Civic Responsibility in Safeguarding Democracy (#DEMCOR)

The project aims to map global business initiatives for democracy, identifies what motivates firms to defend democratic institutions, and build AI-powered simulations to prepare firms against democratic erosion.


Projektteam:
Semuhi Sinanoglu
Julia Leininger

Zeitrahmen:
2025 - 2026 / Laufend

Projektbeschreibung

Businesses are developing corporate civic responsibility initiatives to protect democratic values and institutions like electoral integrity, civic participation, good governance, diversity, and openness. In addition to principled support for democratic institutions, commercial interests have also motivated businesses in a number of countries to come out against populist trade protectionism, internet shutdowns, or foreign agent laws.

However, businesses’ global role in protecting democracy still remains underdeveloped. There is a lack of systematic knowledge about when, why, and how corporations engage in pro-democracy action. Do businesses respond to workforce demands for democratic values? Does peer behavior influence corporate democratic engagement? What role do sector characteristics or market dependencies play? Without answers to these questions, one cannot identify best practices, activate potential corporate allies, or understand the conditions that transform them into defenders of democracy.

So far, there has also been insufficient cross-sectoral collaboration between the private sector and international democracy protection stakeholders. In some contexts, the ecosystem suffers from unproductive conversations in silos, failing to reach out to non-traditional actors. In response, IDOS has launched a new initiative to rethink and revitalize corporate civic responsibility in safeguarding democracy. Three key insights from our work have informed our logic of intervention:

  • There is a clear value-added to engage businesses for democracy protection as non-traditional/emerging actors. Businesspeople may use market influence to incentivize democratic norms, help bridge private sector, civil society, and policy domains for democracy protection purposes, and reframe democracy as a business-critical infrastructure by demonstrating the economic benefits of stable democratic systems.
  • Engagement of businesses for democracy protection requires a new toolkit and framework of conversation. Democratic resilience should be packaged as business risk management, and democratic stability should be highlighted as a necessary condition for good economic performance, as democratic erosion is shown to produce higher compliance costs and increased market uncertainty. A new engagement strategy should include business-centric resilience indicators.
  • National-level corporate programs may not be enough to counter global-level autocratization trends. To that aim, a unified response would help leverage combined economic influence and coordinated economic pressure on anti-democratic actors with knowledge-sharing and networking mechanisms.

We envision the following activities and outputs:

  • Research: Creating a global dataset of existing business initiatives that support different types of democratic institutions and experiments with the workforce and administration to analyze the effectiveness of different nudges for increased support for democracy initiatives.
  • Resources and outreach: Case-study-based modules with AI-empowered democratic stress test simulations, offering insights into how businesses should react to different types of executive aggrandizement or incumbent overreach.

 

Events

 

Publikationen