The concept of sustainable development was first introduced in “Building Sustainable Society” by Brown (1981), states that it is necessary to control population growth, protect the resource base, and develop renewable energy for long-term viability and gain a competitive advantage.  According to the stakeholder theory proposed by Freeman (1984), firm managers must not only consider the interests of shareholders but also fully comprehend the needs of various stakeholders. They must then strategically balance the benefits of multiple stakeholders and work to maximize their collective interests. One popular metric that has become mainstream to evaluate business sustainability actions is measuring the three pillars of sustainability: environment, social, and governance (ESG) scores. Tracing back the origin, ESG research was originated from the topic of Corporate Social and Responsibility (CSR), which evolved through hundreds of years (Lin and Li 2024), and with climate change posing a major threat to not only human health but also social progress, economic growth, and firms’ development, businesses should consider economic efficiency and sustainable development while aiming to maximize firms’ value. 

Ample literature has studied the relationship between firms' Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) performance and financial performance which signals evidence that ‘it pays to be green’. Mohammad and Wasiuzzaman (2021) find that the more transparent the disclosure of ESG performance indicators by a company, the less the information asymmetry, and the better its relationship of trust with related stakeholders. This in turn elevated enterprise value in financial markets (Egginton and McBrayer 2019), effectively enhance a company’s business financial performance (Chen, Kuo and Chen 2022) and predict its long-term capital value and sustainable development status (Yu, Guo and Luu 2018) even during times of unexpected COVID-19 pandemic crises. In addition,  (Fu, Yu et al. 2024) found that improving ESG performance helps reduce financial risks and idiosyncratic risks (Reber, Gold and Gold 2022). Therefore ESG data is increasingly important, especially for future-oriented investors (Wu, Li et al. 2022, Ma, Pan and Suardi 2023). 

However, previous studies also suggest that conducting ESG activities beyond regulation is costly and reduces the profits of firms and their shareholders. Environmental investments and high environmental performance represent only increased costs, resulting in decreased earnings and lower market values (Hassel, Nilsson and Nyquist 2005). Agency theory explains ESG performance might have an adverse impact on firm financial outcomes, arguing that managers are likely to use ESG practices to engage in self-serving behavior at the expense of shareholder wealth and reallocate resources from wealth maximization to socio-environmental objectives (Jensen and Meckling 1976, Buallay, AlAjmi et al. 2024). Especially in emerging countries with limited corporate transparency in corporate cultures and business regulations perceived ESG risks to be more pronounced compared to developed countries (Duque-Grisales and Aguilera-Caracuel 2021).

As indicated by most early studies, having connections with the government might provide benefits to firms in the form of preferential access to financing (Houston, Jiang et al. 2014) and have better opportunities for subsidy and penetrating lucrative industries (Li, Li et al. 2021) which may trigger firms to form affiliations with government officials when they intend to make significant investments to support their ESG performance. Zhou (2024) shows that state-owned enterprises perform significantly better than nonstate-owned enterprises in terms of ESG transformation. The increasing ESG performance may ultimately help companies strengthen support among key stakeholders, including by helping them improve community relations, attract and retain talented employees, and foster customer loyalty. 

However, the effects of government involvement on firm performance often support rent-seeking behavior in the form of government subsidies or licenses for exclusive rights to provide goods and services that are accompanied by corruption that emerges as a natural byproduct (Shleifer and Vishny 1994, Hope, Li et al. 2020). Being politically connected may cultivate trust among politicians which helps companies play defense against nonmarket risks, including by reducing the threat of government regulation (Liu, Wei and Zhang 2023). Therefore firms may adopt political investment strategies to mitigate the risks associated with the negative impacts of ESG incidents, such as lowering market value (Capelle-Blancard and Petit 2019), which ultimately leads to the destruction of shareholders' value (Asante-Appiah 2020). Kuo, Chen and Meng (2021) pointed out that a performance gap exists between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises, with state-owned enterprises performing poorly in terms of efficiency and financial performance compared to privately owned companies.

In order to better understand the role of government in affecting firms' sustainability performance, this study attempts to examine the literature on the role of government affiliation on ESG performance using scientometric analysis to provide a systematic and objective understanding of the topic. Through this research, we hope to 1) find out whether the literature on this topic still growing 2) Who are the influential contributors on this field 3) Which countries and journals are the most active parts in this study 4) What are the field’s knowledge clusters of research hotspots 5) What are the research frontiers and trends in the field.

To deal with the above questions, we employ scientometric analysis on peer-reviewed articles from the Web of Science (W.o.S.) Core Collection on the impact of government affiliations to ESG Performance with the help of bibliometric tools, Citespace, and VosViewer to get references that resemble an intellectual base in the area. This study has several contributions. First, we describe the evolution of M&A research by analyzing highly cited publications, citation structure, authors, universities, countries, and journals. Second, we highlight the theories underlying the research on the impact of government affiliation on ESG performance from highly cited and significant publications; third, relevant papers are analyzed to explore research gaps and venues for future research agendas. Fourth, we present a bibliometric analysis that provides useful and valuable information for future political connections, ESG performance, and corporate finance studies. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 illustrates the research process, which includes selecting the software and database and searching and screening the relevant literature. Section 3 presents the outcomes of the co-author, co-term, and co-citation analyses. Section 4 discusses the future research directions in this field. Section 5 provides a summary of the work and its limitations.

To avoid missing seminal articles in the bibliometric review and to reduce researcher bias, this study adopts the PRISMA method in selecting and reviewing publications. The collection of articles relevant to the topic under analysis was carried out using Web of Science Core Database Collections, which cover the majority of the publications in the social sciences. The keywords were defined to help researchers find relevant articles that extend existing topics in a particular field. 

Past literature often measures government influence on a firm as a current politician operating in a firm and state-owned companies. Therefore, this study uses the terms "political connection" and "state-owned enterprise" to refer to the relationship between companies and individuals with political influence and power in the government. Their suitability for long-term investments, especially those that are related to sustainability, has been tested by some researchers. Hence, based on its objectives, this study used the keywords ("political connection" OR "state-owned enterprise") AND (“ESG Performance” OR “Sustainability Performance”) in the titles, abstracts, and keywords of articles to filter the relevant works published in the Web of Science databases.

This paper applies three criteria to retain articles for our analysis. First, the article must be in English. Second, the article must involve empirical research that is published in peer-reviewed journals. We discard book reviews, tables of content, miscellanea, editor reports, etc. Third, the search term must appear in the article's main body. Our decision to focus solely on peer-reviewed journals is driven by our interest in understanding how political connections affect ESG or sustainability performance. Therefore, we discard articles that mention political connections or state-owned enterprises in references only. 

Textbox 1 String used for researching database:

Thus, on 10 August 2024, a basic search for title, abstract, and keywords was conducted on WOS databases. According to the articles extracted from WOS, the first article on government affiliations and ESG Performance was published in 2002. Hence, the period of our search covers 22 years period. This first-round screening process yielded 271 articles. From these articles, we retrieved their titles and abstracts and other bibliographic such as details, authors' names and affiliations, journal names, and year of publication. We exported all the information to an MS Excel spreadsheet. After removing duplicates, the 252 pre-selected papers were reviewed by reading their titles and abstracts. The screening and eligibility phases led to the selection of 243 articles that are included in the analysis (Figure 1).

This study utilized quantitative and qualitative methodologies, emphasizing quantitative techniques. In order to help researchers better understand the current research status and future research direction in this field, we use knowledge mapping from the published paper, which is helpful in evaluating academic studies in a specific field using bibliometric analysis. By using secondary data, bibliometric analysis examines secondary data acquired on the digital database from a quantitative and objective perspective. This approach allows for the introduction of a systematic, transparent, and reproducible review process, and then enhances the reliability and quality of the review (De Bellis 2009). 

We use CiteSpace 6.1.R7, which was initially established by Dr. ChenChaomei from Drexel University, and VOSviewer 1.6.20 developed at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies to conduct a quantitative bibliometric investigation and highlight the structure and dynamics of the topics in government influence and corporate ESG performance. The main analysis tools in bibliometric analysis are co-occurring analysis and co-citation analysis. Co-citation analysis of cited authors and journals aims to identify eminent authors by analyzing citation records as well as cited journals that contribute to understanding related scientific journals in this field. As a consequence, the more often a publication is referred to, the more predominant it will turn out to be for developing a focal area. In the analysis of co-occurring, the prominent authors, journals, institutions and countries in a research field can be illustrated clearly. The results will be visualized as an image of a collaboration network, which can show the frequency of academic collaboration (scholar, country and institution). The higher the citation frequencies of an article, a journal and an author, the more important the reference is. 

This section presents the following results of descriptive statistics, maps, and analyses of publications, authors, journals, institutions, and countries in the field studying the relationship between political connections and sustainability. In addition, this section also provides the results of co-citation analysis of cited references, cited authors, and cited journals, as well as evolution analysis on keywords using VosViewer and Citespace to gain overall perspective development on the topic.

To study research trends, we examine the number of articles published annually. Figure 1 presents the annual publications and trendline of publications retrieved from Web of Science Database collections from 2002 – 2024. It shows that studies regarding the relationship between government affiliations and firms’ ESG Performance experienced a steady increase until 2018, and the number rapidly rose in the last couple of years. This implies that this field of research is still at its rapid development stage, and new theories, new methods, and new technology may emerge as researchers continue to study at the particular topic.     

Table 1 presents the top 14 research direction of publications in the topic. The most popular research directions are in the category of Environmental science (64 publications), business finance (60 articles), green & sustainable science & technology (48), environmental studies (43), followed by management (39), business (37), engineering, environments (15), multidisciplinary science (10), operations, research and management science (9) and engineering industrial. Besides, there are also some directions in the area of public administration, energy & fuels, and ethics. We can see that there are rich research directions and the topic of political connections and ESG performance has been used in many fields. 

Table 1. Top 14 Subject Categories

Table 2 lists fifteen articles with the highest citation reports on government affiliations and corporate ESG Performance (2002 – 2024). The number of citations can indicate the impact and influence of a publication within its field. The most cited paper on the list is by Zhang, Rong and Ji (2019) with 359 citations, which shows that there is a positive relationship between green innovations that are measured by green patenting influences a firm’s subsequent performance, especially in state-owned enterprises, which indicates that politically connected firms are able to increase green innovation by leveraging their close relationship with the government. Meanwhile, Witt (2019) explore the role of political strategies in the business sustainability of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the de-globalization environment based on two major theories two: liberalism and realism. To maintain and expand economic interconnectedness, MNEs may be involved in direct political engagements, such as lobbying policymakers to counteract pressure from anti-globalization factions and utilizing corporate social responsibility initiatives as a means to deter segments of the population from developing a negative stance on globalization. Furthermore, a significant number of citations for other relevant papers, such as Voegtlin and Greenwood (2016) that study the impact of corporate social responsibility to human resource management and the role of state agencies and labour union in pressuring firms to engage in socially responsible behavior with 193 citations, Lin and Zhu (2019) that examine the impact of fiscal spending to  green economics (139 citations), and Fang, Nie and Shen (2023) (139 citations) which analyzes the impact of enterprise digitization on ESG performance and finds that the positive effects of digitalization on ESG performance are more pronounced in non-politically connected firms.

We also explore the most relative and prominent journals which articles in the domain of political connections and ESG performance. Table 3 shows the ranking of 15 most productive sources along with the impact factor, which is used as a proxy for the relative important source of publications. The top three most important productive journals are Sustainability, Financial Research letters and Journals for cleaner production. 

Table 2. Most Productive Authors in the Research Field

Table 3. Top 12 Journals in the platform research

Figure 2 and Table 4 shows the production of various countries in the domain of political connections and ESG Performance, with China, the UK, and the USA having the highest production. In recent years, there has been growing emphasis on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, leading to the emergence of ESG investment as a critical ethical consideration in both developed and developing nations. The published research literature indicates that China, as an emerging economy, is currently a significant participant in global ESG-related scholarship, along with several leading developed countries.

Table 4. Highly Productive Nations

Figure 3 shows academic partnerships between institutions, visualize using Citespace. The size of the nodes represents the number of articles published by each institution, and the lines connecting the nodes indicate the strength of collaboration between different institutions. Table 5 presents the 10 most productive institutions that have publications in the scientific field from the WOS database. Hong Kong Polytechnic University is the most productive institution, with 6 publications and 124 citation count. This is followed by Beijing Normal University, Xiamen University, and Chongqing University with 5 publications each with respective citation counts of 49, 153, and 27. Capital University of Economics & Business has the highest total citation count of 158 among all institutions with 4 publications. All of the top 15 most active institutions are located in China. 

Table 5 Top 15 influential institutions in the platform research field

In order to analyze the core literature used examining the effect of government affiliation on firms’ ESG performance, we use co-citation analysis from VosViewer, to identify seminal works that have significantly influenced or been drawn upon in the particular research area. The co-citation analysis is also used to investigate the thematic similarities between publications within a specific research field, as well as to study how the literature is structured through the cited publications. Setting a minimum threshold of 5 citations per author, a total of four clusters were obtained, which are represented in Figure 4 in red (78 items), green (52 items), blue (45 items), yellow (45 items) and purple (17 items). 

Figure 4 Co Citation of Cited References

Using Citespace,  we list the detailed information of the top 12 references with the strongest citation bursts from 20002 to 2024, along with the emergent intensity and duration of the research, which enables researchers to understand the evolutionary development trend of the relationship between political connections and ESG performance (Figure 5). When a time period in burst detection is red, it means that the element is experiencing a reference burst during that time period, which may indicate an underlying trend in the field. Through further analysis, we found that most of the 12 references were published in top journals, and their research topics mainly focused on ESG performance of the listed firms (Xu, Zeng and Tam 2012, Friede, Busch and Bassen 2015, Zhang, Rong and Ji 2019), firms environmental innovation (Berrone, Fosfuri et al. 2013), impacts CEO role to ESG performance (Li, Gong et al. 2018), impact of political connections to firms’ performance (Faccio 2006), the role of government in ESG implementation (Wang, Wijen and Heugens 2018), physology of firms behavior (Baron and Kenny 1986), firms’ financing constraints (Kaplan and Zingales 1997), rationalization and bureaucratization in the organization (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) and the impact of political connections to ESG performance (Zhang 2017). 

Figure 5. References with Strongest Citation Burst

To further analyze the core contents of the research papers, we conduct keyword analysis from the sample of  243 articles using relevant terms they use in their abstracts and titles using CiteSpace and VOSviewer, and then mapping primary keywords, choosing type of analysis as ‘co-occurrence’ and unit of analysis as ‘all keywords’. As illustrated in Figure 6, based on the density map of high-frequency keywords are “performance”, “sustainability”, “political connections”, “disclosure” “governance”, “ownership”, and “firm performance”.

We also use the keyword timezone in Citespace to mapp the development history and thematic evolution of the government affiliations effect to firms’ ESG performance research field for the last ten years by keyword clustering view (Figure 7). The mapping shows the dynamic process of the thematic evolution of political connections in corporate ESG performance research. The position of the node of a keyword in the knowledge graph is when the keyword first appeared in the research literature. The connecting line represents the two keywords that appear in the same paper. High-frequency keywords appear more often, and their location nodes are larger, while these keywords are also hotspots for research. The word “performance” is found in the related articles as early as 2010, and this suggests the earlier involvement in this domain is closely related to ESG and political connections. Later, the most frequent repeating phases such as “sustainable development,” “corporate social responsibility,” “political connections,” “governance,” sustainability “ownership,” “disclosure,” and “environmental performance” have been widely discussed and appear as research keywords within the time period of 2014 - 2018. From then on, various topics such as “state-owned enterprise”, “green innovation”, “ESG performance”, “financing constraints”, “digital transformation”, and “corporate ESG performance” were discussed.

Figure 7.  Map of timezone view

Over the past two decades, ESG practices to address global challenges of climate change, social inequality, and environmental degradation have been the main concern among governments, businesses, and civil society organizations to achieve sustainable development goals in both developed and developing countries. This study was conducted to perform a scientometric analysis of a literature review related to government affiliations and ESG performance based on the research articles from 2002 – 2024 using Web of Science Core Database collections.  This study aimed to investigate the knowledge structure of using VosViewer and Citespace to map and visualize the prominent authors (at the micro levels), institutions (at the meso level) as well as the country (macro) level within the research topic. To our knowledge this study provides the first extensive and thorough bibliometric analysis of the specific correlation between government affiliations and corporate ESG performance thus in general, the findings in this paper play a key role in that the scholars who are interested in conducting further research studies on political connections and ESG performance. 

However, this study also has some limitations. (1) The articles studied were selected only from one prominent database (WoS), which may have affected the number of relevant articles collected. Future studies should consider additional databases such as Scopus, Google Scholar, and Dimensions for a more comprehensive bibliometric review. (2) Despite including criteria in the literature search, the wide variation in content and definitions of Political Connections/ State Ownership and ESG performance literature may result in overlooking other relevant terms during the search process and possibilities of a certain degree of personal subjectivity. Therefore, future studies should ensure the comprehensiveness and completeness of the concepts and adopt more objective criteria for cleaning and organizing the literature.

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