The politics of CEOs

https://voxeu.org/article/politics-ceos


Alma Cohen, Moshe Hazan, Roberto Tallarita, David Weiss 24 July 2019

•••••

CEOs have acquired an important role in the policy discourse. They are active and influential participants in the policy debate (Chatterji and Toffel 2018); they often act as nonpartisan advisers to US presidents and policymakers (Gara 2016, Meyersohn 2017); and they are directly (and successfully) involved in policy advocacy through their most prominent association, the Business Roundtable, which was established in 1972 for the explicit purpose of formulating and advocating policy views.

•••••

Our study finds that public-company CEOs consistently prefer Republican candidates. Most CEOs donate to both Democrats and Republicans. However, even for CEOs who donate to both parties, how they split the contributions between the two parties can display partisan preferences.

•••••

Republican-leaning CEOs are about three times as many as Democratic-leaning CEOs, regardless of whether we classify the political preferences of CEOs based on a threshold of 60%, 67%, or 75% of the total donations.

•••••