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The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges of Japanese political leadership in combating corruption with an emphasis on the 1970s and 1980s when Tanaka Kakuei and Miki Takeo led Japan.

This paper discusses the perceived extent of corruption in Japan, the importance of Japan’s gift-giving culture, and examines the efforts of Miki Takeo and the consequences of his political reforms for Japanese politics. Comparison is made with his predecessor, Tanaka Kakuei, to highlight the differences in combating corruption between both leaders.

Compared to Tanaka Kakuei, who was highly corrupt, Miki Takeo left a mixed legacy. He managed to revise campaign finance laws but lacked the political will and support from his party. The reforms he implemented failed to reduce money in politics, but they favoured the opposition in the collection of funds.

This paper will be useful to scholars and policy-makers interested in studying the role of leaders in curbing corruption and the challenges of political reform.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether companies that donate to winning electoral campaigns are more aggressive in terms of tax planning than companies that do not make these contributions. The relationship between politicians and companies may be signaled by political connections in which companies try to get political benefits in exchange for providing politicians with campaign financing. The hypothesis is that a quid pro quo occurs in which these companies benefit from favorable tax treatment that reduces their relative tax burden.

The focus of this study is donations that were made in the presidential elections of 2010 and 2014. The sample covers the period between 2010 and 2016 for companies listed on the B3 Stock Exchange, using proxies for tax aggressiveness computed based on value-added reporting. Through linear regressions, the authors have tested whether the companies that made these campaign contributions tend to have a lower tax burden.

The proposed hypothesis was confirmed, revealing that a political connection between campaign donations reduces the tax burden for donating companies during the years following the election. These donations appear to depict an environment characterized by an exchange of favors in which the donating companies exhibit greater tax aggressiveness than non-donating companies.

The current study deals with a subject that has not yet been examined empirically in Brazil and reinforces the position adopted by the Supreme Court in prohibiting campaign donations to inhibit quid pro quo practices. The study offers additional arguments for the criminalization of the so-called “second set of books” used to record electoral campaign contributions.

The purpose of this study is to understand the role of the migrant entrepreneur’s social capital and specifically their family social capital in the success of their crowdfunding ventures.

This paper develops an exploratory single case study of the Persu Bag started by a Chinese migrant entrepreneur in the USA, which was documented through in-depth interviews, email communication, social media interactions and secondary documents publicly available. This paper draws on crowdfunding and social capital literature to fulfil the purpose and adopt the perspective of the migrant entrepreneur in the study.

The study shows that the crowdfunding migrant entrepreneur’s family network contributes with their operand and operant resources from both the country of residence and country of origin. Besides having financial capacity, institutional knowledge and experience from both the host and home countries, the family network in both countries make the crowdfunding immigrant entrepreneur’s families more resourceful, providing additional benefits to the crowdfunding migrant entrepreneurs in the development of the campaign and crowdfunded venture.

This study broadens the understanding of the ways migrant entrepreneurs can rely on their family social capital for building financial capacity and starting a crowdfunded venture.

Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular channel for project fundraising for entrepreneurial ventures. Such efforts require fundraisers to develop and manage a crowdfunding campaign over a period of time and several stages. Thus, the authors aim to identify the stages fundraisers go through in their crowdfunding campaign process and how their engagement evolves throughout this process.

Following a multiple case study research design analysing six successful campaigns, the current study suggests a taxonomy of stages the fundraisers go through in their crowdfunding campaign management process while identifying the types of engagement displayed and their relative intensity at each of these stages.

The study proposes a five-stage process framework (pre-launch, launch, mid-campaign, conclusion and post-campaign), accompanied by a series of propositions outlining the relative intensity of different types of engagement throughout this process. The authors show that engagement levels appear with high intensity at pre-launch, and to a lesser degree also at the post-launch stage while showing low intensity at the stages in between them. More specifically, cognitive and behavioural engagement are most prominent at the pre- and post-launch stages. Emotional engagement is highest during the launch, mid-launch and conclusion stages. And social engagement maintains moderate levels of intensity throughout the process.

This study focuses on the campaign process using engagement theory, thus identifying the differing engagement patterns throughout the dynamic crowdfunding campaign management process, not just in one part.

This study aims to understand, from the analysis of the work of a Brazilian network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), how advocacy on human rights issues is developed to defend causes before the legislative branch, identifying its contributions and effectiveness. For this, were observed, the strategies and tactics employed in the implementation of two advocacy campaigns promoted by a Brazilian NGOs network.

The research adopts the method of inductive investigation with a qualitative approach and uses the techniques of semi-structured in-depth interviews and documentary research. The paper is developed within the scientific field of public relations (PR), uses as reference the critical theory and the rhetorical theory of PR, and is based on the concept of advocacy.

Some results of the advocacy are observed, such as the greater awareness of political decision-makers, in addition to the influence on the definition of the political agenda and on the action of the political decision-makers.

Among the limitations of this study are the time span for analyzing the campaigns' actions, which could be extended to observe long-term results, as well as the dedication of the study exclusively to the legislative branch since the campaigns also sought to influence decision-making in the executive branch.

The results found encourage the strengthening of the democratic environment since it increases the power and influence of civil society in the political decision-making of the legislative branch.

The study showed that advocacy, as a PR activity, increases civil society participation in political decisions.

A network of partners helps and assists a crowdfunding platform (CFP) in scouting, assessing and selecting projects. This cooperation increases the number of successful projects by attracting a sizable number of investors, proponents and attracting marginal investors when a campaign falls short of the threshold for success. This study examines the role of partner networks in a platform ecosystem, specifically in terms of number of different partners and their diversity in the performance of the crowdfunding campaign.

Using logistic and linear regressions, we analyze a sample of 233 projects, both funded and not funded, launched by 10 Italian equity CFPs between 2014 and 2018.

Our findings indicate that the variety of partners in a platform's network influence the probability of campaign success and how much capital the proponent company raises. CFPs are resource-constrained new ventures, and a network with a wider variety of partners ensures the strategic resources and competencies that are required in an early stage market, thus facilitating campaign funding.

The variety of partner networks could help CFPs to offer unique and strategic value propositions and define the competitive positioning of platforms.

This study provides a deeper understanding of the determinants of equity crowdfunding campaign performance by emphasizing the role of CFP's network of partners on the entire crowdfunding ecosystem and its underlying organizational elements.

Crowdfunding (CF) is a digital-financial innovation that, bypassing credit crisis, bank system rigidities and constraints of the capital market, is allowing new ventures and established companies to get the needed funds to support innovations. After one decade of research, mainly focused on relations between variables and outcomes of the CF campaign, the literature shows methodological lacks about the study of its overall behavior. These reflect into a weak theoretical understanding and inconsistent managerial guidance, leading to a 27% success ratio of campaigns. To bridge this gap, this paper embraces a “complex system” perspective of the CF campaign, able to explore the system's behavior of a campaign over time, in light of its causal loop structure.

By adopting and following the document model building (DMB) methodology, a set of 26 variables and mutual causal relations modeled the system “Crowdfunding campaign” and a data set based on them and crafted to model the “Crowdfunding campaign” with a causal loop diagram. Finally, system archetypes have been used to link the causal loop structure with qualitative trends of CF's behavior (i.e. the raised capital over time).

The research brought to 26 variables making the system a “Crowdfunding campaign.” The variables influence each other, thus showing a set of feedback loops, whose structure determines the behavior of the CF campaign. The causal loop structure is traced back to three system archetypes, presiding the behavior in three stages of the campaign.

The value of this paper is both methodological and theoretical. First, the DMB methodology has been expanded and reinforced concerning previous applications; second, we carried out a causation analysis, unlike the common correlation analysis; further, we created a theoretical model of a “Crowdfunding Campaign” unlike the common empirical models built on CF platform's data.