Replication data for: Independent Labels? The Power behind Environmental Information about Products and Companies

Power is a ubiquitous term in political science, and yet the discipline lacks a metric of power that can be applied to both formal and informal political contexts. Building on past work on power and power resources, this paper develops a method to estimate the power of different actors over an organization. It uses this method to analyze the power of the public, private, and civil sectors within an original dataset of 245 cases of corporate sustainability ratings and product eco-labels, such as ENERGY STAR, LEED Certification, and Newsweek's Greenest Company Rankings. These initiatives have received limited attention from the political science literature, but they have become an increasingly prominent political phenomenon. The paper finds that the private and civil sectors have more power over these information-based governance initiatives than the public sector. It also reveals their lack of transparency and hybrid accountability relationships, which complicate their legitimacy and effectiveness.

权力（power）是政治学领域中无处不在的核心概念，但该学科至今仍缺乏可同时适配正式与非正式政治场域的通用权力衡量指标。本文立足过往关于权力与权力资源的相关研究，提出了一种可估算不同行动者对某一组织所拥有权力的分析方法。本文依托该方法，针对由245个企业可持续发展评级与产品生态标签案例构成的原创数据集，分析公共部门、私营部门与公民社会部门的权力分布格局。该数据集涉及的典型举措包括能源之星（ENERGY STAR）、LEED认证（LEED Certification）以及《新闻周刊（Newsweek）》绿色公司排名（Newsweek's Greenest Company Rankings）。尽管此类治理举措在政治学研究文献中受关注程度有限，但如今已成为愈发凸显的政治现象。研究结果表明，相较于公共部门，私营部门与公民社会部门在这类信息型治理举措中拥有更显著的权力。同时，研究还揭示了此类举措存在透明度不足与问责关系混杂的问题，这使得其合法性与有效性的实现面临更多复杂挑战。