Partisan Politics and Annual Shareholder Meeting Formats

We study companies’ decisions about holding annual shareholder meetings on-line during the Covid pandemic, and returning to classical in-person meetings post-pandemic. Among S&P 1500 companies, the frequency of virtual meetings shot up from less than 10 percent to more than 80 percent in the first year of the pandemic, with only gradual reversion to in-person meetings since then. Partisan politics has significant associations with these decisions. In-person meetings are more likely for companies that have Republican CEOs, and for companies with headquarters located in jurisdictions that vote Republican. Corporate democracy therefore seems to have been swept up by the tides of contemporary political feuds.