Intersections of Power, Politics, and Corporate Strategies

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

With increasing economic disparities and market concentration, powerful special interests are a threat to democratic representation, both in local and national policy making arenas. The four papers on this panel examine how corporate interests increase their representation in US politics. Limited attention has been paid to corporate interests in local politics, in part due to data limitations. The first two papers on this panel are efforts to better understand interest group donations in local politics. Gaudette’s paper investigates how Seattle’s democracy voucher program and the associated increase in small donors changed interest group behavior in subsequent elections. Carreri et al. present a newly collected dataset on over 2,000 mayoral elections between 2000-2018 and provide a first comprehensive insight into political contributions at the local level. The other two papers study the increasing symbiotic relationship between the federal government and private companies. Hollenbach et al. introduce a newly assembled data set on employment histories and capital assets of all employees in the federal bureaucracy between 2015 and 2023. They combine these with data on federal contracting, lobbying, and federal advisory committees to study conflicts of interests and firms’ benefits from political connections. The last paper also investigates the effects of firms’ political connections but from the opposite angle. Studying ‘revolvers’ in corporate America, Egerod et al. present data on former public officials on boards of all publicly listed US firms. They show that the arrival of such revolvers increases the propensity to lobby and raises firms’ sales. Individually, each paper will make important contributions to the study of money and access in democratic politics. Together, these four papers offer a panoramic view of the ways democratic institutions can be captured by moneyed outside interests and the steps that citizens can take to improve accountability.

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Chair

• Florian Hollenbach Copenhagen Business School

Discussant

• David Szakonyi George Washington University

Individual Presentations

• Who Donates in U.S. Cities’ Mayoral Campaigns? - Edoardo Teso, Harvard University; Rui Yu, University of Pennsylvania; Maria Carreri, University of California Berkeley & Bocconi University

• Competing for Access: Conflicts of Interests within the US Executive Branch - Florian Hollenbach, Copenhagen Business School; Kyuwon Lee, University of Southern California; David Szakonyi, George Washington University

• Revolvers in the Corporate Elite - Benjamin Egerod, Copenhagen Business School; Jan Stuckatz, Copenhagen Business School; Michael Mueller, Copenhagen Business School