The Political Partisanship of American Business: A Study of Corporate Political Action Committees

Abstract

This study uses data on the contributions of political action committees to evaluate six popular theories of business political partisanship. Two theories are supported by the data: the Yankee-Cowboy theory of regional political differences among U.S. corporations and the regulatory environment theory, which views the differential relationship to government regulation as a primary determinant of political behavior. No support is found for four other theories of business political partisanship: the core-periphery theory, the inner-circle theory, the managerialist theory, and the domestic-multinational theory. The four disconfirmed theories are all variants of a perspective known as the theory of corporate liberalism, which hypothesizes a tendency toward greater liberalism on the part of the more dominant or central corporations in American society.

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