This essay highlights productive ways in which scholars have reanimated the concept of structural power to explain puzzles in international and comparative politics. Past comparative scholarship stressed the dependence of the state on holders of capital, but it struggled to reconcile this supposed dependence with the frequent losses of business in political battles. International relation (IR) scholars were attentive to the power of large states, but mainstream IR neglected the ways in which the structure of global capitalism makes large companies international political players in their own right. To promote a unified conversation between international and comparative political economy, structural power is best conceptualized as a set of mutual dependencies between business and the state. A new generation of structural power research is more attentive to how the structure of capitalism creates opportunities for some companies (but not others) vis-à-vis the state, and the ways in which that structure creates leverage for some states (but not others) to play off companies against each other. Future research is likely to put agents – both states and large firms – in the foreground as political actors, rather than showing how the structure of capitalism advantages all business actors in the same way against non-business actors.

Structural power is a critical variable that merits more extensive and more explicit attention in Latin American political economy and in comparative politics more broadly. Assessing structural power in conjunction with its counterpart, instrumental power, can provide strong leverage for explaining variation in policy outcomes that affect business interests. However, structural power must be carefully defined and operationalized in order to capture its core attributes and nuances. This task requires wedding the concept's “structural” underpinnings with policymakers’ perceptions and anticipated reactions. Moreover, the relationship between structural power and instrumental power must be carefully theorized. While these concepts encompass distinct channels through which business exerts influence, the two types of power may be mutually reinforcing. I argue that business interests shape policy outcomes when either their structural power or their instrumental power is strong, yet business influence will be more extensive and more consistent when structural power and instrumental power are both strong. However, electoral incentives, and more importantly, popular mobilization, can counteract business power. I illustrate these theoretical points with a case study of Chile's 2014 tax reform proposal, a major policy initiative with important distributive consequences that received international press attention.

I examine the challenges of conceptualization and measurement of structural power when the differential power of industries or individual firms are in question. While ascertaining structural power's operation at this level can be very challenging, I point to some issues of conceptualization and measurement that can enhance our analytic leverage at the initial stages of the research process. Specifically I propose a more refined language of “structural prominence” to differentiate between the expected causes of structural power from its hypothesized effects. Using a variety of data I show that researchers have some simple tools at their disposal but must pay careful attention to basic logical inferential limitations when examining structural power arguments. Through an examination of firms’ reactions to policy proposals in US securities regulation I find positive evidence for structural power operating in initial policy proposals. When I examine levels of preference attainment in the policymaking process itself, structural power appears to be playing a weaker and more conditional role. I also find that the preference attainment of firms is greatest when structural and instrumental forces operate in conjunction, a finding supportive of recent research in this area.

How much authority can sovereign states exercise over international banking in times of financial globalization? While most literature on international finance is rather pessimistic, this article argues that in case of US law enforcement, this pessimistic view is increasingly erroneous. The reason is that US authorities can take advantage of international banks’ structural dependence on access to the dollar-based financial system to force banks into punitive agreements or to plead guilty in case of criminal offenses. Using the conflict between the USA and Swiss banks over tax evasion by US persons, this article demonstrates that banks in the liberal economic system can no longer survive without access to the US-controlled, dollar-based financial system, thus giving the USA structural power over banks. In addition, it is shown that US structural power can be used strategically during negotiation processes to apply pressure on banks. Finally, while the use of this structural power was originally restricted to smaller banks, whose collapse would not endanger the world economy, US authorities have recently learnt to manage market expectations in a way that allows them to also target banks that were previously considered “too big to jail.”

How did the most severe global financial crisis since the 1930s affect the organization of the world political economy? Was Anglo-American structural power in finance eroded? I employ network methodologies that have been recently extended for use with weighted and directed networks to shed light on these questions. I draw from complexity science and political economy to link these empirics to prior theories of structural power, which I refine in several ways. This approach provides unique explanations for developments in global banking since the crisis, including expected outcomes that did not occur: the continuation – and even expansion – of Anglo-American prominence, the decline of continental European prominence, and the lack of emergence of the BRICS economies into the core of the global banking system.

What is the relationship between globalization and the political power of business? Much of the existing literature focuses on the ability of mobile capital to threaten exit in order to press for more business friendly rules. In this article, we refine arguments about exit options in global markets by arguing that the relative exit options available to business and other actors are neither fixed, nor exogenous consequences of some generically conceived process of globalization. Instead, they themselves are the result of struggles between actors with different interests and political opportunities. Since exit options play a crucial role in determining the relative structural power of business vis-à-vis other actors, we dub the power to shape exit options structuring power, distinguishing it from structural power, and argue that it is crucial to explaining it. We identify two channels through which actors can shape exit options – extending jurisdictional reach and reshaping the rules of other jurisdictions – and the factors that will make regulators and business more or less capable of exercising structuring power. We then use two exploratory case studies – one involving privacy regulation, the other accountancy standards – to illustrate how structuring power can work to shape exit options, and thus structural power. We conclude by considering the relationship between structuring power, structural power, and the existing literature in comparative and international political economy.

Multinational firms unavoidably exert influence over politics through power that is generated by both structure and process. While both political economy and management scholars address international firms, neither field has an adequate understanding of the reciprocal relationship between multinational firms and geopolitical systems. The links between multinational firms form a distinct type of international system for the private sector – one that is simultaneously enmeshed in geopolitics and international markets even as it is also autonomous from them. The scholarly literature on the power of business in politics has demonstrated how influence derives from instrumental agency as well as structural influence, but it has taken an unnecessarily restrictive view of politics and an overly materialist theory of power. Politics are about much more than government policies. In this paper I propose an analytical framework for understanding the multinational firm as a set of relationships. I then apply one key element of that approach – the relationships among firms as a direct source of geopolitical outcomes – to the natural gas trade of Eurasia in three eras that span nearly 40 years. I conclude that the influence of business on a broader understanding of politics – and not just policies – should be central to the study of international and comparative political economy.

The power of business is a very important issue for understanding the operation of democracy, but establishing the nature and extent of its power is not easy. We acknowledge that this is, in large part, an empirical problem and requires a more sophisticated conceptual framework to address it. Attempting to address this, the recent literature on the power of business has increasingly focused on the role of structure, agents and ideas. However, too little attention has been paid to how these concepts are defined and conceptualized. We argue that it is crucial to: specify the structures (economic/political/social) which we see as affecting the role of business; identify the agents, collective and individual, involved and how they interact; and specify which ideas are playing a role, at what level of generality and how these different ideas at different levels of generality interact. This article explores these issues through a critical consideration of the extant literature in order to provide a more developed framework for future empirical analysis.