The political context in which corporate law is made is all too often ignored. Manabu Matsunaka has an interesting post on some recent scholarship, including his own work, on the subject:
Culpepper argues in his book Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan that salience of an issue (the extent to which a political issue draws the electorate's attention) determines whether politicians intervene in corporate law making When the salience of an issue is high, politicians act. Otherwise, they leave the issue to specialists. On the other hand, Cioffi and Höpner argue that center-left parties play a critical role in pro-shareholder reforms in their paper and in Cioffi’s monograph.
Still, the best thing I ever read on the politics of corporate law is Roberta Romano's Metapolitics and Corporate Law Reform, 36 Stanford Law Review 923 (1984).
