How the Workplace Affects Employee Political Contributions

How important is the workplace for employees’ political donations? Contrary to research on workplace political mobilization, existing work assumes that most individual donors contribute ideologically. I link donations of employees and Political Action Committees (PACs) from 12,737 U.S. public companies between 2003 and 2018 to show that 16.7% of employee donations go to employer-PAC-supported candidates. I investigate the dynamics between employee and PAC donations within firm–legislator pairs over time and find that both rank-and-file employees and executives contribute more dollars to company-supported politicians. Firm–employee donation alignment is stronger on powerful and ideologically moderate politicians with high value for the employer. Results from a difference-in-differences design further show modest changes in the partisan composition of employee donations after swift changes in the partisan donations of corporate PACs. The results suggest investment-related rather than ideological motives for alignment and highlight the importance of corporations for money in politics.

Do candidates benefit from rejecting PAC contributions? Evidence from a pre-registered candidate evaluation survey experiment

Despite the public's purported distaste for candidates supported by political action committees (PACs), they remain prominent in American electoral politics, with their total spending exceeding $582 million in the 2020 cycle. Does this dislike of PACs provide an opportunity for candidates to increase their likelihood of (re)election? Using a candidate evaluation survey experiment fielded as part of the 2020 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we investigate how the decision to accept or reject PAC contributions affects candidates' evaluation and voters' willingness to support their election efforts. We find that voters are more likely to vote for, donate to, and trust candidates that reject PAC contributions. Surprisingly we fail to find evidence of moderation by respondent's party ID. Republican and Democratic voters both penalize candidates that accept PAC money. This study is among the first to study how candidates' campaign financing choices influence their evaluation by voters.

EXPRESS: Strategic Polarization in Group Interactions

We study the phenomenon of strategic group polarization in which members take more extreme actions than their preferences. The analysis is relevant for a broad range of formal and informal group settings, including social media, online platforms, sales teams, corporate and academic committees, and political action committees. In our model, agents with private preferences choose a public action (voice opinions), and the mean of their actions represents the group’s realized outcome. They face a trade-off between influencing the group decision and truth-telling. In a simultaneous move game, agents strategically shade their actions towards the extreme. The strategic group influence motive can create substantial polarization in actions and group decisions even when the preferences are relatively moderate. Compared to a simultaneous game, a randomized sequential actions game lowers polarization when agents’ preferences are relatively similar. Sequential actions can even lead to moderation if the later agents have moderate preferences. Endogenizing the order of moves (through a first-price sealed-bid auction) always increases polarization, but it is also welfare enhancing. Our findings can help group leaders, firms, and platforms design mechanisms that moderate polarization, e.g., the choice of speaking order, the group size, and the knowledge members have of others’ preferences and actions.

Managerial Political Spending Choice and Earnings Management

This study investigates whether and how the CEOs’ political spending choice is associated with their earnings management behavior. Using a sample of 8,502 firm-year observations from S&P 500 firms during 1993–2012 over 10 election cycles, we provide empirical evidence that CEOs making political spending mainly through the corporate channel to recipients advised by the firms’ own political action committees engage in less earnings management than those making political spending mainly through the private channel to their own selected recipients. This finding suggests that CEOs’ political spending choice of the private channel over the corporate channel represents their strong self-interests and is associated with higher agency costs. We further show that the distinction between the two channels is less important when the CEOs’ private political spending patterns are aligned with those of their own firms. Our results are robust to techniques alleviating the potential endogeneity issue related to political spending behavior.

The Rise of Political Action Committees

This book explores the origins of political action committees (PACs) in the mid-twentieth century and their impact on the American party system. It argues that PACs were envisaged, from the outset, as tools for effecting ideological change in the two main parties, thus helping to foster the partisan polarization we see today. It shows how the very first PAC, created by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1943, explicitly set out to liberalize the Democratic Party by channeling campaign resources to liberal Democrats while trying to defeat conservative Southern Democrats. This organizational model and strategy of “dynamic partisanship” subsequently diffused through the interest group world—imitated first by other labor and liberal allies in the 1940s and 1950s, then adopted and inverted by business and conservative groups in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Previously committed to the “conservative coalition” of Southern Democrats and northern Republicans, the latter groups came to embrace a more partisan approach and created new PACs to help refashion the Republican Party into a conservative counterweight. The book locates this PAC mobilization in the larger story of interest group electioneering, which went from a rare and highly controversial practice at the beginning of the twentieth century to a ubiquitous phenomenon today. It also offers a fuller picture of PACs as not only financial vehicles but electoral innovators that pioneered strategies and tactics that have come to pervade modern US campaigns and helped transform the American party system.

Introduction

This introduction highlights the controversial nature and limited extent of interest group electioneering in the early twentieth century compared to its pervasiveness today. When early interest groups did engage in elections, they sought to appear nonpartisan, whereas many contemporary interest groups operate in effect as allies of the major parties. While different generations of political scientists have offered theories that explain each approach to elections and partisanship, they do not explain the shift in interest group behavior apparent across the twentieth century. This introduction provides a developmental account, elaborated in later chapters, that explains the intertwined embrace of electioneering and partisanship among major interest groups in the mid-twentieth century. It recounts when and why these groups formed political action committees (PACs) to undertake these electioneering activities and argues that such PACs have been used to transform the American party system.

Standing on Their Shoulders: Suffragists, Women’s PACs, and Demands for Women’s Representation

Although 2018 has been called another “Year of the Woman,” increases in women’s representation that year were party-specific. Historically, women’s organizations fought to expand women’s representation in both parties; however, the fruit of these efforts is currently concentrated among Democrats. Indeed, women contributed funds in record numbers in 2018, but the majority of women donors supported Democratic women candidates (Haley 2018), and liberal women’s political action committees (PACs) played a prominent role in raising those funds.

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

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.