Our more recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses voter demographics and the diploma divide.
The Political Transformation of Corporate America, 2001-2022
Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 4974868
118 Pages Posted: 9 Oct 2024 Last revised: 17 Oct 2024
Reilly Steel
Columbia Law School; Princeton University
Date Written: October 02, 2024
Abstract
This article reconciles conflicting views about the political landscape of corporate America with new data on the revealed political preferences of 97,469 corporate directors and executives at 9,005 different U.S. companies. I find that average ideology for these individuals has shifted meaningfully to the left over time, changing from modestly conservative in 2001 to roughly centrist by 2022. This finding supports a middle-ground position between conventional wisdom casting "big business" as a conservative stronghold and revisionist views holding the opposite. Counterfactual simulations and a difference-in-differences design suggest multifaceted causes for these changes, and hand-collected data on corporate stances on LGBTQ-related legislation coupled with an instrumental variables design indicate that individual ideology has large effects on firm-level political activity. Overall, this transformation has profound implications for American politics, as the individuals comprising one of the most powerful interest groups—corporate elites—appear to be fracturing ideologically and to some degree even switching sides.Suggested Citation:
Steel, Reilly, The Political Transformation of Corporate America, 2001-2022 (October 02, 2024). Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 4974868, Available at SSRN:
