{
  "url": "https://stakesproject.org/concepts/home-government-pressure/",
  "language": "en",
  "type": "concept",
  "title": "Home-government pressure",
  "description": "Home-government pressure: the government of a firm's own country, not investors or activists, is the source executives name most often when explaining why they went quiet. Evidence from STAKES Brief 01.",
  "updated": "2026-08-25",
  "project": {
    "name": "STAKES",
    "grant": "353416",
    "funder": "Research Council of Norway",
    "funder_id": "https://doi.org/10.13039/501100005416",
    "host": "Centre for Global Sustainability (GLOBE/SUM), University of Oslo",
    "term": "2025-07-01/2029-06-29"
  },
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "alternates": {
    "en": "https://stakesproject.org/concepts/home-government-pressure/"
  },
  "term": "Home-government pressure",
  "definition": "Home-government pressure is pressure on a company's social and environmental commitments that originates with the government of the country where the company is headquartered, rather than with host governments, investors or campaigners.",
  "defined_in": {
    "title": "Has Your Company Gone Quiet, or Just Given Up?",
    "series": "STAKES Brief 01",
    "url": "https://stakesproject.org/outputs/has-your-company-gone-quiet/",
    "full_text": "https://stakesproject.org/outputs/has-your-company-gone-quiet/full-text/"
  },
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "What executives actually name",
      "text": "Asked in free text who is pressuring them, executives named their own state first. The White House, the Justice Department and presidential posts on Truth Social appear in 12 distinct accounts, ahead of investors and shareholders at 8 and climate and greenwashing campaigners at 6 (Figure 3).The examples are concrete. One firm pulled out of a Middle East programme to avoid retaliation. Another took a Department of Homeland Security contract over internal objections. One respondent said the climate made him reluctant to answer the survey at all."
    },
    {
      "heading": "And then they align with it anyway",
      "text": "The most agreed-upon item in the whole survey is alignment with that same state. Eighty-two per cent agree it is in their company's interest to align with their home government's policy priorities. Four per cent disagree. Among Europeans agreement reaches ninety per cent.That reverses the usual assumption about business and politics, which holds that companies discipline governments rather than the other way round."
    },
    {
      "heading": "The European variant",
      "text": "European agreement with alignment means something different, because the thing being aligned with is different. Brussels regulation works as a shield: it lets a firm keep doing social work and call it compliance. That asymmetry explains most of the transatlantic gap in quieting.It cuts the other way too. A quarter of US executives now decline to endorse ESG, and one German respondent reported his firm is more careful about engaging with American companies as a result."
    },
    {
      "heading": "What to do with it",
      "text": "Alignment with the home state is rational and it carries a cost that belongs on the books. The brief's advice to managers is to scenario-test the portfolio the way fragile-market veterans test conflict exposure: work out which commitments would survive an administration change, a regulator's attention, or one viral post, before somebody else works it out for you."
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    {
      "term": "The Conservative Turn",
      "url": "https://stakesproject.org/concepts/conservative-turn/"
    },
    {
      "term": "Corporate quieting",
      "url": "https://stakesproject.org/concepts/corporate-quieting/"
    }
  ]
}