Study On CSR Rent-seeking Behabior Based On The Turnover Of Municipal Party Committee Secretary

In the western corporate social responsibility theory system,the government regards the government as merely the stakeholders of the tax revenue in the market economy.This is obviously inconsistent with China's national conditions under the transitional economic system.Different from the western high free market economic system,the government drives the development of the corporate social responsibility in China from top to bottom.Therefore,ignoring the research on corporate social responsibility under the influence of government regulation will inevitably lack the explanatory power of real life.This paper takes the political and institutional power motives of Chinese corporate social responsibility behavior as the starting point,and attempts to discuss and explain the Chinese corporate social responsibility behavior from the perspective of the system level.Based on the institutional background of the government's strong ability to intervene in enterprises,this paper selects the new political economy's rent-seeking theory as the corporate social responsibility research framework,analyzes and finds that promotion pressures give local government officials the opportunity to accept corporate social responsibility rent-seeking,and tax-sharing reforms.It also created better conditions for rent-seeking,and corporate social responsibility behavior has evolved into the possibility that companies and local government officials exchange results based on economic benefits.At this point,the driving force of corporate social responsibility under political interference has shifted from the original government pressure to the internal motivation for firms to obtain political rent-seeking in order to strengthen government-enterprise relations.However,it is difficult to quantify the political rent-seeking tendency of corporate social responsibility.In order to overcome this obstacle,this article sets the scene of the replacement of the local party committee secretary.Municipal level local governments,as the third level of the government's vertical power organization,exert greater influence on companies than other sectors of the government.Among them,the local party committee secretary in the position of “number one” is the “key node” in the interest network of government-enterprise relations.Once the replacement of local party committee secretaries,the existing alliance of government-enterprise interests is disintegrated and the relationship between government and enterprises is reshuffled.The “blank period” caused by the replacement of the local party committee secretary will be the most urgent and frequent period for enterprises to reconstruct the relationship between government and enterprises for political rent seeking.Under the situation of the replacement of the local party committee secretary,it is possible to more clearly test the tendency of corporate social responsibility to build government-enterprise relations and political rent-seekingThis paper selects listed companies in China from 2008 to 2015 as research samples.Then we collected data on the turnover of the local party committee secretaries of 334 prefecture-level cities and 4 municipalities directly under the Central Government through information channels such as Zhecheng,Baidu,and government websites from the year of 2007 to 2014.This study investigates whether firms in China use corporate social responsibility(CSR)to build political networks.Specifically,we examine how abrupt termination of existing political connections caused by replacement of city mayors affect Chinese listed companies' CSR choices.Using the regression analysis,we draw the following three conclusions: First,we find that when the municipal Party Committee Secretary is replaced,corporate social responsibility is an effective tool for political rent-seeking;Second,we find when the municipal Party Committee is replaced,non-state-owned enterprises are more eager to use corporate social responsibility for political rent-seeking than state-owned enterprises.Third,when the municipal Party Committee is replaced,Corporate Social Responsibility as a political rent-seeking tool is more effective for party committee secretaries transferred from the other city.This paper uses China's unique institutional background to verify the applicability of the political and institutional power motivation theory of corporate social responsibility behavior in China.This article believes that the perception of corporate social responsibility should be changed from the original government pressure to the political needs of the company's self-recognition.The research results in this paper enrich the micro-research on the influence of the replacement of the local party committee secretary on corporate behavior,and expand the research field that affects the economic behavior of enterprises because of political uncertainty.