Article 17: Right to own property alone or in association; no arbitrary deprivation of property
Helpful
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
This article is mostly outside corporate reach: it is about land, inheritance, and government seizure, matters of state law. But the shareholder-rights version of the question is real. A record 41 percent of U.S. IPOs went public with unequal voting rights in 2025, up from about 10 percent of all IPOs since 1980, meaning more owners hold shares whose votes count for less than an insider's. Alphabet's 2017 case is the clearest illustration. Class A shareholders who could vote supported giving every share an equal vote by 99.8 percent, and the company made no change. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin controlled 51 percent of votes while owning about 11 percent of shares. The Council of Institutional Investors did win a real change in 2017, persuading S&P Dow Jones to bar new multi-class companies from its indexes, and CalPERS's 2016 lawsuit stopped IAC chairman Barry Diller from creating a new non-voting share class. Separately, the SEC's 2020 rule changes, sought by the Business Roundtable, made it harder for shareholders to file or resubmit proposals at all.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
The human right to own property is chiefly about land tenure, expropriation, inheritance and state seizure, none of which turn on corporate conduct. The one place shareholder-democracy logic bites is dual-class share structures. They let founders control the practical use of other people's owned property (their shares) regardless of how those owners vote.
Corporate lobbying, led by the Business Roundtable, persuaded the SEC to raise the ownership and resubmission thresholds for filing shareholder proposals in 2020. That narrowed owners' practical ability to exercise voice over their own shares. But it is one contributing constraint among several (state corporate law, listing rules) rather than the primary obstacle to property ownership as a whole.
1 and 1, higher of the two, gives Helpful
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Dual Class IPOs, by Tech and Non-tech, 1980-2025, Jay R. Ritter, University of Florida, 2025-12-31
- Alphabet Shareholders Overwhelmingly Support Equal Voting, CorpGov.net, 2017-06
- CII Welcomes S&P Dow Jones' Decision to Ban New Multi-Class Companies from Key Stock Indexes, Council of Institutional Investors, 2017-07-31
- Snap Decision: Leading Index Providers Nix Multi-Class Shares, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 2017-08-02
- CalPERS v. IAC: Clear Win for Investors Protecting Shareholder Voting Rights, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance
- Federal Register: Procedural Requirements and Resubmission Thresholds Under Exchange Act Rule 14a-8, SEC / Federal Register, 2020-11-04
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Lobbied S&P Dow Jones, MSCI and FTSE Russell to bar non-voting and multi-class shares from major indexes after Snap's 2017 IPO with no voting rights for public shareholders.
Filed 'Give Each Share an Equal Vote' proposals at Alphabet and Meta, winning 99.8% support among Class A shareholders at Alphabet in 2017 without any change to the share structure.
Alphabet Shareholders Overwhelmingly Support Equal Voting, CorpGov.net
Filed a comment letter supporting the SEC's 2020 amendments raising the ownership and resubmission thresholds for shareholder proposals under Rule 14a-8.
4 campaigns on record
Raise the ownership thresholds needed to file a shareholder proposal (from $2,000/1% held one year to a tiered $2,000-3-year/$15,000-2-year/$25,000-1-year test) and raise resubmission vote thresholds from 3/6/10% to 5/15/25%.
Result: adopted September 23, 2020, effective January 4, 2021
The ownership and resubmission bar for filing or refiling a shareholder proposal at any U.S. public company rose across the board.
Bar new companies with multi-class or non-voting share structures from the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600.
Result: S&P Dow Jones announced the ban on July 31, 2017; FTSE Russell adopted a related minimum-voting-rights policy the same year
New multi-class companies (including Snap) were excluded from the S&P 500 and related indexes going forward.
Give each outstanding share one equal vote, ending the Class B supervoting structure held by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
With James McRitchie, Boston Common Asset Management
Result: an estimated support of up to 99.8% among Class A shareholders able to vote, up from 86% in 2016
we found no documented change: Alphabet did not alter its share structure, because Page and Brin controlled about 51% of the vote while holding roughly 11% of shares combined.
Alphabet Shareholders Overwhelmingly Support Equal Voting, CorpGov.net
Block a proposed new non-voting Class C share class that would let chairman Barry Diller and his heirs keep 44% voting control while owning under 8% of the stock.
Result: defendants abandoned the plan rather than go to trial
IAC did not create the new non-voting share class; Diller's existing supervoting structure remained but was not further entrenched.
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.