Coercive Corporations: How Corporate Exit Threats Bring States to Their Knees

This thesis investigates whether Corporate Exit Threats (CETs), explicit threats by corporations to withdraw investments, relocate operations, or shut down activities in a jurisdiction to influence government policy, constitute normatively illegitimate distortions of political autonomy. Given the growing economic power and mobility of multinational corporations, understanding the normative implications of CETs is increasingly important, yet currently underexplored. To address this gap, this thesis develops a philosophical framework of coercion, drawing on Nozick’s classical account and Abizadeh’s refinements. Coercion is turned to because it captures a paradigmatic form of autonomy violation and sets a demanding threshold for normative illegitimacy. The formulated framework integrates both descriptive and normative criteria to determine when CETs are coercive. While multiple approaches exist within said framework, this thesis pursues one normative pathway and proposes a sufficient...Show moreThis thesis investigates whether Corporate Exit Threats (CETs), explicit threats by corporations to withdraw investments, relocate operations, or shut down activities in a jurisdiction to influence government policy, constitute normatively illegitimate distortions of political autonomy. Given the growing economic power and mobility of multinational corporations, understanding the normative implications of CETs is increasingly important, yet currently underexplored. To address this gap, this thesis develops a philosophical framework of coercion, drawing on Nozick’s classical account and Abizadeh’s refinements. Coercion is turned to because it captures a paradigmatic form of autonomy violation and sets a demanding threshold for normative illegitimacy. The formulated framework integrates both descriptive and normative criteria to determine when CETs are coercive. While multiple approaches exist within said framework, this thesis pursues one normative pathway and proposes a sufficient condition under which CETs qualify as coercive. Through applying this approach to Amazon’s threats against Seattle’s head tax in 2018, this thesis demonstrates that CETs can meet the criteria set for coercion and, as such, concludes that CETs are coercive when they undermine a democratic institution’s ability to pursue its self-determined ends by leveraging economic might, such that the government’s ability to meet a basic need is constrained. In this consideration, political autonomy is taken as the central normative criterion. This outcome thus renders CETs normatively illegitimate exercises of political power. In this process, this thesis applies and extends existing theories of coercion to the context of CETs, clarifying how such threats operate in democracies and why they are normatively troubling. It thus provides a rigorous, philosophically grounded method for assessing CETs, demonstrating that the normative illegitimacy of corporate influence can be assessed through the lens of coercion. While acknowledging that other frameworks for assessing illegitimate influence exist and remain potential avenues for further research, this work transforms a broadly held suspicion into a precise philosophical argument, advancing the debate on the moral boundaries within which corporations may operate in democracies.Show less

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Coercive Corporations: How Corporate Exit Threats Bring States to Their Knees