Who Owns the Message? Ownership Structure and Climate‐Lobbying Alignment Disclosure in Europe

ABSTRACT This study examines how ownership structure shapes disclosure regarding the alignment between corporate climate lobbying and publicly stated climate commitments, a critical yet underexplored dimension of climate transparency and corporate governance. Prior research has largely focused on general sustainability or climate reporting, leaving limited evidence on whether firms' political engagement through lobbying supports, contradicts, or remains opaque relative to their climate goals. To address this gap, the study develops a Climate‐Lobbying Alignment Disclosure (CLAD) index using manual content analysis supplemented by third‐party assessments and applies it to a panel of 2138 publicly listed European firms across 11 countries from 2012 to 2023. Drawing on agency, stewardship, socioemotional wealth, and institutional perspectives, the analysis examines family, institutional, state, foreign, and managerial ownership. Firm fixed‐effects regression is complemented by two‐stage least squares, system GMM, ordered logistic models, propensity score matching, and conditional fixed‐effects logit models to address endogeneity concerns and assess robustness under alternative assumptions. The results show that institutional and foreign ownership are consistently associated with higher CLAD, whereas family and managerial ownership are associated with lower disclosure. State ownership exhibits a positive but comparatively weaker association. Board independence and gender diversity are also positively related to CLAD, underscoring the role of board composition in promoting stakeholder‐aligned oversight of politically sensitive conduct. The findings extend climate transparency research by identifying ownership identity as a structural determinant of climate policy accountability and by positioning political alignment disclosure as a governance‐relevant transparency domain. The evidence offers practical guidance for regulators, investors, and boards seeking to narrow the climate‐lobbying gap by strengthening disclosure expectations and engagement mechanisms that improve consistency between corporate climate rhetoric and political action.