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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
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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

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Supplementary material: Link

Stuckatz Dataset

Dataset

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

Stuckatz supplementary material

Appendix

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