Roxan Degeyter

Corporate political advocacy (CPA), corporations taking public, value-driven stances on divisive sociopolitical issues, has become a prominent feature of contemporary public discourse. While CPA’s impact on both formal political processes (such as legislative outcomes), and informal processes (public opinion formation), is increasingly evident, its normative legitimacy remains underexplored. Although CPA is closely related to at least three adjacent research domains, none provides an adequate framework for assessing it. First, normative analyses of related corporate activities such as (political) corporate responsibility ((P)CSR) or conventional political interventions such as lobbying fail to capture CPA’s distinctive ontological features. Second, frameworks developed specifically for CPA leave crucial issues, especially its democratic legitimacy, undertheorized. Third, approaches that address the democratic legitimacy of market-based social change focus primarily on consumer, rather than corporate, advocacy. This article addresses this gap by developing a normative theory of CPA grounded in a systemic theory of deliberative democracy. Considered in isolation, CPA can be considered as the exercise of disproportionate power in debate, due to its resource-based amplification of perspectives, conducted by institutions that are internally undemocratic and/or fail to represent the views of its members. Yet from a systemic perspective, legitimacy additionally depends on effects on the democratic, epistemic, and ethical functioning of the system as a whole. CPA may be legitimate if it enhances inclusion, circulates relevant information, while sustaining mutual respect among citizens. Conversely, when CPA operates without public scrutiny, much like lobbying, or advances content that threatens democracy’s substantive core, it risks eroding political equality, undermining foundational democratic rights, and fostering alienation and polarization, thereby compromising its deliberative legitimacy.

Academics and legal practitioners unanimously agree that two of the main justifications for protecting free speech are autonomy and democracy. Free speech contributes to both the self-development of individuals, as well as to robust democratic processes, and should therefore be protected. This is also the position of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). However, the explicit endorsement of both justifications might give rise to normative questions regarding its protection of commercial speech. While the Court has acknowledged that commercial speech does not contribute significantly to self-development nor democracy, it still awards that form of speech a relatively high level of protection. Moreover, a compelling case can be made suggesting that some forms of commercial speech, such as commercial advertising, might even harm those values. This argument is investigated closely to demonstrate an internal contradiction within ECtHR jurisprudence, between its rhetoric focused on respecting autonomy and democracy, and its practice that might in reality undermine these values.

The scope of this paper can be clarified by means of a well-known phenomenon that is usually called ‘industrial melanism’: the fact that the melanic form of the peppered moth became dominant in industrial areas in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such changes in relative phenotype frequencies are important explananda for population biologists. Apart from trying to explain such changes over time, population biologists also often try to explain differences between populations, e.g. why yellow shell colour is dominant in certain colonies of land snails and almost absent in other colonies. The causal explanations that are given to address such explananda are the objects of analysis in this paper. Our primary aim is to explicate their structure: we want to capture the typical ingredients of causal explanations in population biology, and their organisation. Based on this explication, we discuss how natural selection fits into recent mechanical philosophy of science, and engage in the debate on the nature of evolutionary theory.