The so-called political corporate social responsibility (pCSR) literature investigates firms’ taking on state-like functions by providing public goods. In this paper, we investigate the role pCSR plays in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We call this phenomenon public political CSR (p2CSR). We test two competing theses about SOEs providing public goods: the positive social externalities view, which considers SOEs to be instruments of the state that are used to provide positive societal outcomes; and the impunity view which posits that SOEs are sheltered from pressures that drive CSR adoption in privately owned firms. Using a novel panel dataset of 130 electricity firms in 28 countries, we test hypotheses about SOEs' effectiveness in reducing harmful emissions and waste. We primarily find support for the impunity view and sheltering of SOEs from regulatory pressures. We build on international relations theory and argue that p2CSR is underpinned by a different type of politics than pCSR, namely raison d’État. This allows us to offer new insights into SOE impunity in providing public goods, thus shedding light on the underexplored phenomenon of p2CSR.
