Much of our understanding of corporate political strategies implicitly builds on firms’ experience in advanced democratic political systems and the use of legal political strategies to shape public policies, limiting theorization. We extend this research stream by analyzing how the diversity of political contexts influences the selection of corporate political strategies. To do so, we first clarify the dispersed variety of political strategies in the literature and classify them by their aim (shaping, adapting, avoiding) and legality (legal, illegal) into six types: lobby, bribe, comply, disguise, escape, and circumvent. We then build on the structure-conduct-performance paradigm of industrial organization to study the selection of corporate political strategies. This paradigm argues that the structure of the marketplace determines firm conduct, which in turn drives performance. Applying the same logic, we conceptualize political systems as political marketplaces and explain how three types (competitive, oligopolistic, monopolistic) drive firms’ selection of political strategies to achieve desired political outcomes.