Today corporations increasingly partner with citizens to fight for common political cause. In the most extreme examples, companies go as far as to found and fund their own citizen advocacy organizations, enlisting everyday people as the faces of public campaigns. While critics use terms such as "front group" to frame these organizations as secretive counterfeits of real grassroots activism, the political efficacy of these groups is quite real. So why have front groups proliferated in our political moment? How do the affordances of media, as industries and technologies, structure their political work? And how, ultimately, do these organizations shape notions of citizenship and political participation for their members? This dissertation project addresses these questions through a study of corporate grassroots political campaigns in the U.S. and Canadian fossil fuel sectors. The project is based on fieldwork conducted in Nebraska, Alberta, and Washington D.C., including approximately fourty-one in-depth interviews with front group organizers, citizen participants, journalists, pipeline regulators, and politicians. The dissertation also includes a framing analysis of a decade of news coverage on Keystone XL, examining how the voices of front groups and oil companies inflect reportage.

Through this multi-methods approach, the dissertation shows that grassroots corporate outreach today is a direct response to governments' attempts to make the politics of oil more citizen centered. Environmental impact assessments, public comment periods, and online feedback portals---all tools routinized in the government review of oil projects only since the 1970s--- have incentivized corporations to seek citizen allies who can speak in these forums. The work of corporate activist groups is, nonetheless, highly dependent on new media technologies, using vast data collections to target potential supporters, and employing online tools to create a sense of community amongst members. While front groups are often critiqued for their secretiveness, I find that most corporate grassroots campaigns are open about their funders. Financial transparency, in fact, does ideological work, presenting connections between companies and the public as licit political formations.