Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Corporate Democracy Shareholder

Any democracy is only as robust as its electoral process. Elections at U.S. corporations lack several attributes of any good democratic system.

But a corporation is not a political entity. It is an economic entity. An economic entity has different goals from a political entity. In today's Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein senses something is not quite right with this incessant focus on corporate democracy:

In the case of allowing shareholders to nominate directors, for example, much of the rationale seems to be based on the romantic notion that corporations should be laboratories of democracy, with open annual elections for all directors, and majority and minority factions. In practice, I suspect running a corporation requires more stability and internal harmony than the democratic model allows.

· Harmony [CorpLawblog ]