15-01-2025
Investors lack critical information when making their investment decisions: lobbying data. As a result, they may invest in companies whose political influence contradicts their public stance in terms of ESG goals, with significant reputational and financial repercussions.
The 2025 Good Lobby Tracker unveils a worrying reality: investors lack quality data about the nature and extent that companies exercise their political influence vis-à-vis policymakers. And yet ample evidence demonstrates that corporate lobbying and political influence profoundly shape markets, public policy and public opinion.
The Tracker is the first of its kind to evaluate all major initiatives measuring corporate political accountability, ranging from sustainability reporting frameworks to ESG data and ratings providers. It shows that the majority of ESG raters, including MSCI, Bloomberg, Ecovadis, Morningstar and Sustainalytics measure at most a quarter of a company’s lobbying practices. Moody’s and S&P perform least badly among traditional ESG raters, including 40% of lobbying data.
“By not making lobbying data accessible to investors, ESG data providers typically provide an incomplete image, at best, and a false image, at worst, of the company they are investing in”, argues Professor Alberto Alemanno, who designed the Tracker. Today, “it is perfectly possible that a company scores well on environmental and social measures included in an ESG survey while boycotting progress on these very issues to a legislature. And yet this tends to escape investors’ attention, and oftentimes the companies themselves.”
The Tracker not only scrutinizes how effectively the various initiatives assess corporate accountability, but also ranks them based on the quality and quantity of political data they gather.
Corporate political activities remain a risky blind spot
Despite signs of progress, much remains to be done. All aspects of corporate political engagement must be included in the initiatives discussed here in order to provide a full and accurate picture of a company’s influence. Only then can stakeholders make informed decisions and manage the risks associated with corporate political activity.
For media inquiries: Dr Jacquelyn Veraldi – [email protected]