REBALANCE advances beyond the state of the art by addressing key limitations in existing scholarship on business, human rights, and democracy. While prior research has documented corporate influence on regulation, public policy, and social and environmental outcomes, it remains fragmented and largely siloed, with limited empirical integration across domains such as lobbying, taxation, human rights, environmental governance, and civic trust. REBALANCE overcomes these gaps by providing a novel, longitudinal, open-access dataset linking firm-level misconduct—including human rights abuses and tax avoidance—to multi-jurisdictional measures of institutional integrity, democratic participation, and regulatory compliance. It introduces the concept of “double social offloading,” demonstrating that firms engaged in tax avoidance are significantly more likely to commit human rights abuses, thereby shifting both fiscal and social burdens onto communities. The project further establishes causal pathways between corporate misconduct and democratic erosion, as exemplified by micro-level evidence linking industrial pollution to lower voter turnout and increased support for populist parties. Beyond documenting corporate risks, REBALANCE also systematically identifies conditions under which firms strengthen democratic practices, including through internal democratic organizing and intermediary-led multi-stakeholder partnerships that enhance civic engagement, transparency, and inclusion both within firms and across communities. By integrating diverse corporate behaviors—political engagement, regulatory influence, responsible organizing, and multi-stakeholder governance—into a single analytical framework, REBALANCE provides the first empirically grounded account of the cumulative effects of corporate activity on democracy. This holistic approach enables policy-relevant insights, showing not only how to curb harmful corporate practices but also how to leverage responsible firms as allies in strengthening democratic resilience, offering a benchmark for future interdisciplinary research.
