Either with Us or Against Us: Business Power and Campaign Contributions in an Age of Hyper-Partisanship

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231176820
• Author: Niels Selling
• Date: 01 December 2023

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(4) 1764–1779

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231176820

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Either with Us or Against Us: Business

Power and Campaign Contributions in an

Age of Hyper-Partisanship

Niels Selling

1



Abstract

Political scientists have repeatedly failed to establish a relationship between the money compa nies funnel into political

campaigns and how members of Congress vote. Notably, studies have mainly examined how campaign contributions

affect the voting of their direct recipients. However, considering the partisan divide and intense power struggle between

the two major American parties, this paper proposes that the inf‌luence of campaign contributions operates at the party

level. That means a member of Congress is more likely to side with a f‌irm whose donations favor her party, even if the

f‌irm has not given to the member’s own campaign. Correspondingly, legislators should be less likely to vote in line with

the policy preferences of f‌irms whose donations predominately go to the other party. A quantit ative analysis of campaign

contributions, corporate policy positions, and roll-call votes in Congress bears out these propositions. While the paper

also uncovers a recipient effect, the party effect is more substantial.

Keywords

business power, polarization, Congress, campaign contributions, PACs

There is a widespread assumption that corporate interests

shape politics. Indeed, political outcomes correlate

stronger with the policy preferences of the business elite

than those of average citizens (Gilens and Page 2014).

And yet, those who study actual corporate political ac-

tivities have struggled to uncover any clear effects. That is

especially true regarding f‌inancial donations made by

corporations to political candidates, so-called “political

action committee (PAC) contributions.”Although some

have pointed to a positive relationship between a f‌irm’s

contributions and the predisposition of legislators to vote

in line with the f‌irm’s policy objectives, the overall

consensus is that this link does not exist (Fellowes and

Wolf 2004, 315; Fiorina and Peterson 1998, 216). Sim-

ilarly, many business scholars have found no discernible

return on the money business f‌irms invest in political

campaigns (Aggarwal, Meschke, and Wang 2012;Hadani

and Schuler 2013). These null f‌indings f‌it poorly with the

prevailing view that special interests give strategically

(Barber and Eatough 2020;Barber 2016a;Baron 1989;

Brunell 2005;Fouirnaies and Hall 2014,2018;Liu 2022).

This paper aims to help solve these puzzles and

contradictions. The solution consists of shifting at-

tention from the recipient to the party.The conventional

method of gauging the inf‌luence of campaign contri-

butions is to analyze how their direct recipients vote on

legislative proposals. However, we live in an era when

the overriding objective of Democrats and Republicans

is to secure majorities in the House and Senate (Lee

2016).Asaresult,theDemocraticPartyandtheGOP

act as two homogenous voting blocs in Congress (Hare

and Poole 2014;Thurber and Yoshinaka 2015;

Theriault 2008), and the purpose of campaign fund-

raising is increasingly about helping the party

(Currinder 2019;Heberlig and Larson 2012). What that

entails is that the effect of campaign contributions on a

member’s roll call voting should not be a question of

whether the member personally benef‌its from a f‌irm’s

political spending but whether the party benef‌its.

Since parties engage in a fundraising arms race, what

matters specif‌ically should be how much a f‌irm allocates

to one party compared to the other. In other words, parties

Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

Niels Selling, Institute for Futures Studies, Holl¨

andargatan 13,

Stockholm 111 36, Sweden.

Email: niels.selling@iffs.se

will only reward contributors who give them a f‌inancial

edge. The f‌lip side of this argument is twofold. First, f‌irms

that give equitably will not make friends in Congress

beyond (possibly) those lawmakers who receive money

directly from the f‌irm. Second, because of a divided

Congress and a putative willingness to punish groups that

lopsidedly favor the opposing party (McCarty and

Rothenberg 1996), “partisan”f‌irms generate a degree

of opposition to their policy preferences equal to the

support they gain.

To test these propositions, 5578 f‌irm policy positions

on 745 congressional bills were paired with roll-call votes

cast by representatives and senators. The subsequent

analysis conf‌irmed the expectations. A lawmaker is more

likely to vote in conformity with the policy preferences of

af‌irm if it provides disproportionally strong f‌inancial

backing to the lawmaker’s party. At the same time, this

positive effect is offset by an almost equally large negative

one on a lawmaker of the other party. Although the results

also show that contributions do inf‌luence the votes of their

direct benef‌iciaries, the party effect is more substantial

than the recipient effect. These f‌indings enable us to make

sense of a research f‌ield that, on the one hand, asserts that

the purpose of contributions is a quid pro quo and, on the

other hand, f‌inds that contributions have little effect on

recipients, policy outcomes, and the f‌inancial performance

of f‌irms.

This paper proceeds as follows. The next section starts

with an overview of the extant literature. It then identif‌ies

the main weaknesses of previous studies and proposes a

different perspective on how campaign contributions

matter. The subsequent section presents a methodology

and a set of variables to test the hypotheses. What ensues

is a presentation of the results. Finally, the paper discusses

these results in a broader context, identif‌ies their impli-

cations and limitations, and offers directions for future

research.

The Null Findings of

Campaign Contributions

Instrumental power refers to the various means by

which organizations actively try to inf‌luence politics.

The instruments at their disposal comprise campaign

contributions, lobbying, and the revolving door

(Hacker and Pierson 2002). Each one costs money.As a

result, there is a notion that corporations wield con-

siderable political clout by dint of their deep pockets

(Hacker and Pierson 2011). Curiously, scholars have

failed to garner empirical support for that widely held

view (Baumgartner et al. 2009;Smith 2000). What has

proven especially diff‌icult is establishing that campaign

contributions make a difference in how members of the

US Congress vote.

One should mention that corporations do not necessarily

give money to curry favor with legislators. Other potential

reasons include the desire to inf‌luence election outcomes,

obtain information that allows the f‌irm to anticipate future

political decisions, and signal a willingness to f‌ight regu-

latory change (for a review, see Fowler, Garro, and Spenkuch

2020,847–48). It could also be that corporate campaign

f‌inancing is less about benef‌itting the f‌irm and more about

promoting the favorite candidates of top corporate execu-

tives (Aggarwal, Meschke, and Wang 2012;Ansolabehere,

De Figueiredo, and Snyder Jr 2003;Hadani and Schuler

2013).

These alternative rationales may have some explana-

tory power, but they are largely at odds with evidence

showing that f‌irms donate strategically to shape policy

outcomes. Examples of such evidence are the tendency of

companies to direct their contributions to incumbents

(Brunell 2005;Fouirnaies and Hall 2014), members of

relevant and powerful committees (Milyo 1997;Powell

and Grimmer 2016), and members of the majority party

(Cox and Magar 1999). Although contributions may buy

access to elected off‌icials (R. L. Hall and Wayman 1990),

it is then curious that the f‌inancial support of candidates

does not affect how they vote on the f‌loor of Congress.

Despite indications of such a relationship (Davis 1993;

Fellowes and Wolf 2004;McKay 2020;Roscoe and

Jenkins 2005;Barber 2016b;McKay 2018), the overall

consensus after decades of probing is that there is none.

And insofar as there is a positive correlation, it is in-

terpreted as a propensity of outside groups to donate to

ideologically aligned candidates (Burris 2001). In the 90s,

the jury was near unanimous, as ref‌lected in statements

like “most research has failed to establish any signif‌icant

relationship between contributions and votes”(Fiorina

and Peterson 1998, 216) and “it is widely acknowl-

edged in the scholarly community […] that the apparent

connections between money and voting are generally

spurious”(Wright 1996, 137). Subsequent works have

conf‌irmed these verdicts (Ansolabehere, De Figueiredo,

and Snyder Jr 2003;Baumgartner et al. 2009;

Baumgartner and Leech 1998;Fowler, Garro, and

Spenkuch 2020;Wawro 2001).

This paper’s point of departure is the contention that

the inf‌luence of campaign contributions does not need to

primarily operate through those legislators who are di-

rectly on the receiving end. An alternative possibility is

that members of Congress reward partisan donors.

Campaign Contributions from a Party Perspective

Adef‌ining feature of the contemporary American Con-

gress is a deep partisan divide (Theriault 2008). Even if it

is common to view it as a fairly recent phenomenon, the

crystallization of two distinct and homogenous voting

Selling 1765