Paul Nguyen
MIT Department: Political Science
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Ariel White
Research Supervisor: Esteban Fernandez
Undergraduate Institution: Macalester College
Hometown: Saint Paul, Minnesota
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Paul Nguyen is a rising junior at Macalester College, double majoring in Political Science and Economics. A life-long resident of Saint Paul, Paul has developed a keen interest in politics through his active engagement with various community organizations. His interests lie in social movements, American politics, and racial/ethnic politics, which have been sparked by his work with community organizations. Throughout his experiences, Paul has become passionate about studying social movements and their effects on society and government. At Macalester, Paul partners with local neighborhood councils to improve the Saint Paul neighborhoods. His work has led him to ask questions about societal issues and how different societal actors address them. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Political Science in hopes of fostering change and addressing societal needs. Paul is driven to use research to ensure underrepresented voices are heard within politics.
Abstract
Corporate Social Responsibility in Social Movements:
Predicting Companies’ Responses to 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests
Paul Nguyen1 and Ariel White2
1Department of Political Science, Macalester College
2Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Since 2020, corporations have increasingly participated in social movements. For instance, during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, many corporations publicly endorsed racial justice. But why did some corporations make statements while others stayed silent? Existing literature highlights effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) but lacks insights into the predictors. My argument posits that corporations weigh the risks and benefits of making statements on social movement based on consumer reactions. To anticipate consumer reactions, they assess their consumer’s political ideology’s alignment with the political stance of the social movement. Corporations then predict their consumer’s ideology by using the location of their physical stores and measuring democratic vote shares within the respective region. I hypothesize that corporations are more likely to engage in movements aligned with their consumers’ political ideology. To empirically test this, I use the 2020 BLM movement as it received varying degrees of engagement. I regress the democratic vote share of a corporation’s store’s locations with the frequency of statements and expect that corporations in areas with higher democratic vote shares are more likely to make racial justice statements. This research contributes to the social movement literature on corporate activism as it investigates political behavior on corporations.
