CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 147Political Influence and Corporate StrategiesElite Sociology and Global CapitalismElectoral Systems and Political Participation

Avenues of influence: on the political expenditures of corporations and their directors and executives

Open access
Bonica, Adam·2016·Business and Politics
DOI 10.1515/bap-2016-0004
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The literature on corporate political influence has primarily focused on expenditures made by corporations and their PACs but has largely ignored the political activities of the individuals who lead these firms. To better understand the role of corporate elites in political advocacy, I introduce a new database of campaign contributions made by corporate directors and executives of Fortune 500 firms. Donating to political campaigns is nearly universal among corporate elites. When compared to corporate PACs, corporate elites are more ideological, more willing to support non-incumbents, and less likely to target powerful legislators. The results also reveal substantial heterogeneity in the political preferences of directors both across and within firms. In addition to challenging widely held beliefs about the political leanings of corporate elites, the prevalence of bipartisan boardrooms has important implications for how the preferences of key decision-makers within a firm shape its political activities.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1515/bap-2016-0004

Cites

48 of 48 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Corporate political action committees tend to have moderate CF scores, while corporate executives and directors have decidedly more ideological scores, with a strong majority giving to GOP candidates and having relatively high conservative CF scores.

    “Bonica (2016) shows that whereas corporate political action committees tend to have moderate CF scores, the scores of corporate executives and directors are decidedly more ideological, with a strong majority of these elites giving to GOP candidates and having relatively high (i.e., conservative) CF scores.”

    From Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure (2020) · cites this paper as Bonica 2016

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Bonica, A.
Affiliations
Stanford University (US)
Corresponding author
Bonica, Adam
ORCID
Bonica, Adam
Venue
Business and Politics
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2016-12
Volume
18
Issue
4
Pages
367-394
ISSN
  • 1369-5258 (ISSN-L)
  • 1469-3569
DOI
10.1515/bap-2016-0004
OpenAlex
W3122715298
Cited by
147
References
48
Citations by year
2026: 12 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 2
FWCI
24.05
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 84 d)
Locations
  • Business and Politics (publishedVersion)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Funders
Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Political Influence and Corporate Strategies
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
Keywords
corporate political activity, campaign contributions, corporate directors, business executives, Fortune 500 companies, business elites, political ideology

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review