Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xm8r8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-04T09:00:38.686Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Political alignment between firms and employees in the United States: evidence from a new dataset

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2020

Jan Stuckatz Open the ORCID record for Jan Stuckatz [Opens in a new window]
Jan Stuckatz*
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), Toulouse School of Economics, 1, Esplanade de l'Université, 31080 Toulouse Cedex 06, France
*
*Corresponding author. Email: jan.stuckatz@iast.fr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I present a novel measure of partisan alignment between firms and employees. This measure is constructed using data matching 1,691,790 US federal campaign contribution filings of 85,109 individuals to the donations of 874 Political Action Committees (PACs) of publicly listed US companies between 2003 and 2016. The alignment measure shows that employee and employer contributions are highly correlated. Furthermore, firm- and occupation-level factors are significantly associated with firm–employee alignment. Uniquely, these new data can be easily linked to external data on industries, firms, and occupations and consequently allow for in-depth analysis of precisely how companies can influence employees’ politics.

Keywords

Political economypolitical parties and interest groupselections and campaignsquantitative methods
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 215 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acemoglu, D and Autor, D (2011) Skills, tasks and technologies: implications for employment and earnings. In Handbook of Labor Economics, Vol. 4. Elsevier Inc., pp. 1043–1171.Google Scholar
Alt, JE and Gilligan, MJ (1994) The political economy of trading states: factor specificity, collective action problems and domestic political institutions. The Journal of Political Philosophy 2, 165–192.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, S, de Figueiredo, JM and Snyder, JM (2003) Why is there so little money in U.S. politics? Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, 105–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, MJ, Canes-Wrone, B and Thrower, S (2017) Ideologically sophisticated donors: which candidates do individual contributors finance? American Journal of Political Science 61, 271–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bombardini, M and Trebbi, F (2012) Competition and political organization: together or alone in lobbying for trade policy? Journal of International Economics 87, 18–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonica, A (2014) Mapping the ideological marketplace. American Journal of Political Science 58, 367–386.Google Scholar
Bonica, A (2016a) Avenues of influence: on the political expenditures of corporations and their directors and executives. Business and Politics 18, 367–394.Google Scholar
Bonica, A (2016b) Database on ideology, money in politics, and elections: public version 2.0 [Computer file]. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries. Available at: https://data.stanford.edu/dime.Google Scholar
Francia, PL (2003) The Financiers of Congressional Elections Investors, Ideologues, and Intimates. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Gilens, M and Page, BI (2014) Testing theories of American politics: elites, interest groups, and average citizens. Perspectives on Politics 12, 564–581.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, SC, Hafer, C and Landa, D (2007) Consumption or investment? on motivations for political giving. Journal of Politics 69, 1057–1072.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gupta, A, Nadkarni, S and Mariam, M (2018) Dispositional sources of managerial discretion: CEO ideology, CEO personality, and firm strategies. Administrative Science Quarterly.Google Scholar
Hansen, WL, Mitchell, NJ and Drope, JM (2005) The logic of private and collective action. American Journal of Political Science 49, 150–167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hertel-Fernandez, A (2018) Politics at work: how companies turn their workers into lobbyists - and why Americans should care. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–282.Google Scholar
Iversen, T and Soskice, D (2001) An asset theory of social policy preferences. American Political Science Review 95, 875–893.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, SE and Margalit, Y (2017) Informed preferences? the impact of unions on workers policy views. American Journal of Political Science 61, 728–743.Google Scholar
Kitschelt, H and Rehm, P (2014) Occupations as a site of political preference formation. Comparative Political Studies 47, 1670–1706.Google Scholar
Olson, M (1965) The Logic of Collective Action. Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
OpenSecrets.org Open secrets. Center for Responsive Politics. Available at: https://www.opensecrets.org/.Google Scholar
Owen, E and Johnston, NP (2017) Occupation and the political economy of trade: job routineness, offshorability, and protectionist sentiment. International Organization 71, 665–699.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raffo, J and Lhuillery, S (2009) How to play the “Names Game”: patent retrieval comparing different heuristics. Research Policy 38, 1617–1627.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richter, BK and Werner, T (2017) Campaign contributions from corporate executives in lieu of political action committees. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 33, 443–474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheve, KF and Slaughter, MJ (2001) What determines individual trade-policy preferences? Journal of International Economics 54, 267–292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheve, KF and Slaughter, MJ (2004) Economic insecurity and the globalisation of production. American Journal of Political Science 48, 662–674.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, E and Rea, CM (2014) The political mobilization of firms and industries. Annual Review of Sociology 40, 281–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Stuckatz Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PGGXDO
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Stuckatz supplementary material

Appendix

Download Stuckatz supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 286.7 KB