Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to ask the following question: is there a link between being politically connected, the quality of governance and the company’s ownership structure? Design/methodology/approach The author then examined Canadian companies from the S&P/TSX index for the year 2015. Findings Political connectedness is significantly associated with lower quality of governance in relation to shareholders’ rights; ownership concentration is associated with lower quality of governance in relation to the overall governance, board of directors, shareholders’ rights and compensation structure indices; ownership structure does not mediate the relationship between political connections and quality of governance; and number of political connections through the executive is associated with less risky governance practices in relation to compensation structure; in other words, when members of the executive are politically connected, the firm adopts better compensation practices. Research limitations/implications The time limitation is the main weakness of this study and probably the cause of observed mitigated results. Practical implications The author hope that the results will inform regulators on the need not only to further regulate the business-politics relationship, but also to consider the specific traits of concentrated ownership companies and the most critical aspects of corporate governance in politically connected firms, such as shareholders’ rights, particularly those of minority shareholders. For example, an intriguing case to investigate in the Canadian context would be Pierre Karl Péladeau’s foray into Quebec politics and the controversy ignited by his political bid in light of his position as majority shareholder (75 percent) in communications giant Quebecor Inc. Social implications In fact, the results shown that concentrated ownership firms have lower governance quality than non-concentrated ones. Furthermore, in a concentrated ownership context, the minority shareholders’ rights could be threatened. In this sense, the results also shown that shareholders’ rights seem to be the most critical governance issue for the politically connected Canadian firms. These results are therefore the indication that Canadian financial market regulators must take action about politically connected and concentrated ownership firms in order to further protect minority shareholders’ rights. Originality/value This study makes a double theoretical contribution by enriching the literature on corporate governance and by providing one of the first investigations into the direct and comprehensive relationships between political connections, governance and ownership structure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".