The political origins of corporate transparency: forging strange coalitions through information rules and policy entrepreneurship

When does business support corporate transparency laws, and how do they succeed despite opposition from other powerful business groups? Existing research converges on a common causal pathway: Crises increase public issue salience and open windows of opportunity for policy entrepreneurs to pressure politicians into adopting transparency laws. Examining the case of beneficial ownership transparency (BOT) laws, I theorize an alternative causal pathway where past policy decisions mandating information collection by certain industries produce inter-industry divergence in their policy preferences and undermine opposition business lobbying. Civil society groups can then engage in policy entrepreneurship to integrate supportive regulated industries into new coalitions. Large, organizationally diverse ‘strange coalitions’ increase political pressure on policymakers, leading to the adoption of corporate transparency laws. I conduct a structured, focused comparison of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia as parallel demonstrations of this causal pathway. I combine primary and secondary source documentation with 44 semi-structured interviews to trace failed and successful attempts to adopt BOT laws during the 2010s and early 2020s. I center endogenous feedback processes as a primary cause of transparency, provide further evidence of when firms prefer stronger regulation, and highlight the continued importance of domestic interests in transnational policy issues.