Corporate governance regulation is a contested area. The introduction of a corporate governance code could, on the one hand, be understood as a regulatory capture performed by international institutional investors, but on the other hand, as the introduction of a code tend to involve local adaptations it could be understood as support for status quo, and hence favoring strong local interest groups. In this paper, these competing explanations are empirically tested through the analysis of non-compliance by Swedish listed corporations with different corporate control arrangements. The main findings are that corporations with a concentrated “Swedish” control situation (i.e. controlling shareholder holding more than 50% of the votes) explain significantly more than corporations with other ownership arrangements, whereas corporations with dispersed ownership (“Anglo-American” control situation) explain significantly less. This could be interpreted as that the Swedish code - regardless of controlling shareholder involvement in the regulatory process - favor corporate governance arrangements based on dispersed ownership, and hence a control situation that international institutional investors are familiar with. These findings have implications for how corporate governance codes should be understood in a global setting and what roles such codes could perform in a reform process aiming to change corporate governance arrangements.