Scholars of American political economy identify the mid-1970s as a major turning point in the relationship between business interests and the state. Starting in this period, the business community tended to be more aligned with Republicans and more focused on addressing particularistic regulatory issues compared to the preceding, post-war period. The post-war period was characterized by networks of business elites leading on regional and national projects of economic development and civic life. This change in the 1970s is attributed to many factors, among them a response to regulation, pressures from financialization and globalization of firms, a general decrease in civic engagement among elites, and anti-elite sentiment from progressives who saw business leaders as a threat (Useem Reference Useem1986; Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson2010; Vogel Reference Vogel1983; Gilens and Page Reference Gilens and Page2014; Drutman Reference Drutman2015; Mizruchi Reference Mizruchi2013; Hersh Reference Hersh2023).
In the last decade, however, as part of a broader realignment in society, the business community’s political engagement shows hints of a change (Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez Reference Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez2016; Berry Reference Berry2013; Winston, Doty and Lyon Reference Winston, Doty and Lyon2022). CEOs are increasingly taking public stances on broad-based issues such as the environment, democratic institutions, and racial equality (Chatterji and Toffel Reference Chatterji and Toffel2019; see e.g. Business Roundtable 2019). Corporations themselves have entered directly into simmering political controversies, such as in promoting the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 (Friedman Reference Friedman2020). And ordinary Americans, particularly Democrats in the mass public, appear to be welcoming business leadership in politics on issues they favor (Hersh Reference Hersh2023).Footnote 1 Are the nation’s business leaders, defined in this study as those in the top 5% of earners who are in leadership positions in for-profit companies (e.g., C-Suite, president), interested in stepping up their engagement?
Business leaders’ appetite to take on a public leadership role, either personally or on behalf of their company, may depend on their view of the normative role of business in society. A normative vision in which companies are more politically involved in general and on a broad range of social and economic issues stands in tension with two alternative normative visions of business involvement in politics. The first is a vision of companies having minimal to no participation in the political process across issues. Some Americans believe that companies, and their leaders on the company’s behalf, should not engage in politics at all because companies are not people and by advocating in politics companies undermine the will of the public (Gilens Reference Gilens2012; Leighley and Oser Reference Leighley and Oser2017; Jacobs and Soss Reference Jacobs and Soss2010). A second normative vision is that companies and their leaders should engage in politics, but only to advance their specific business interests and increase shareholder value. In this view, companies and their leaders should advocate only insofar as they try to inform and persuade lawmakers and the public of how government affects their own financial interests (Jensen Reference Jensen2009; Jensen and Meckling Reference Jensen and Meckling1976). This view implies a narrow, particularistic interest in political engagement, limited in its magnitude, as opposed to a broad interest in political engagement.
In this article, we measure how support for aspects of these competing normative positions varies in two dimensions: between business elites and the mass public (including private sector workers in the mass public), and between Democrats and Republicans in both populations. Through original surveys, we examine the appetite for these normative positions in terms of greater political involvement in general, the policy areas Americans think businesses should weigh in on, and the political strategies they should employ. For the magnitude of political involvement, we evaluate respondents’ desire for business leaders to be more politically engaged in general. For policy areas, we evaluate respondents’ desire for no engagement at all, for only particularistic engagement, and for engagement across a broad set of issues. We specifically aimed to evaluate the empirical proposition that both elites and the public lean toward a vision of business leaders seeking greater involvement on a broad range of issues. This vision is often associated with the idea of “stakeholder capitalism,” which holds that a company should consider its community, country, or even the whole planet as key stakeholders for which the firm advocates (Paine Reference Paine2023). We pay some attention to subgroups such as Democrats and young people (Hood Reference Hood2023; Versace and Absy Reference Versace and Absy2022), among whom demand for a broad-based stakeholder approach to political activism may be especially pronounced.
Our study offers a window into the supply and demand for a putative market for engagement from corporate leaders on behalf of their companies. The demand we measure is from the mass public, particularly the partisan identifiers in the mass public, who may want more or less political leadership from the leaders of the business sector on greater or fewer issue areas. While we do not directly measure motivations, we note that those who want less engagement may see corporate power as expressed through business leaders as antidemocratic or as simply not aligned with their own political goals. Those who want more may see an increasing alignment on policy between what is good for companies and what is good for the public. The supply we measure comes from the leaders of companies themselves. For moral, practical, or economic reasons, corporate leaders may hold the view that their company or they themselves on behalf of their company should be more or less engaged in political advocacy.
What we find is contrary to the view suggested by recent reports that the mass public, including Democrats, demands greater corporate political activism. We measure low demand among every partisan cohort in the mass public for company leaders to be more active in politics generally. While Democrats in the mass public are more interested in corporate leader activism than Republicans are—a striking finding given the longstanding relationship between business interests and the Republican Party—the mass public on the whole does not wish to see company leaders involved in most areas of social or economic policy.
Among business leaders, however, there is significant appetite for business leaders to be even more involved in advocacy on behalf of their company, going beyond their current level of engagement. The majority of Democratic and Republican business leaders in our sample want major U.S. corporations as well as their own companies to be more involved specifically on topics related to the economy. The consensus breaks down on social and environmental issues, on which Democratic business leaders, but not Republican ones, endorse a vision of deeper business engagement, an important result in light of increasing partisan sorting and polarization among business elites (Fos, Kempf, and Tsoutsoura Reference Fos, Kempf and Tsoutsoura2022). Yet responses from Democratic business leaders do not suggest a belief that their companies should engage exclusively on broad-based issues but not particularistic ones. On the contrary, both Democratic and Republican business elites overwhelmingly believe that companies should be even more engaged than they are now in advocacy on specific business regulations that directly impact [their company’s] work, more so than on any broader issue.
When it comes to strategies of engagement, business elites across partisan lines endorse a vision of quiet, behind-the-scenes advocacy, consistent with what prior work has found (Culpepper Reference Culpepper2010; Useem and Zald Reference Useem and Zald1982; Elsbach Reference Elsbach1994; Ingram and Rao Reference Ingram and Rao2004; Schneiberg, King, and Smith Reference Schneiberg, King and Smith2008; Walker Reference Walker2014; Page, Seawright and Lacombe Reference Page, Seawright and Lacombe2019). For instance, they mainly would like their company’s leaders to be involved in politics through intermediary industry groups. Alternative strategies for business leaders to engage in advocacy, such as those that mobilize customers or workers, are unpopular with elites of both parties. Such strategies are also unpopular with the mass public.
Our study examines a vision of firms and their leaders engaging in politics on issues beyond just particularistic interests and via broad-based strategies such as through customer mobilization (Freeman Reference Freeman1984; Hertel-Fernandez Reference Hertel-Fernandez2018). While that vision is unpopular in the mass public, it is partially consistent with the preferences of Democratic business leaders, who want their own company and major U.S. corporations to be more involved on a range of social and economic issues, but quietly so. To the extent that these policy areas are framed as economic-focused, Republican elites share this vision as well.
Our study comes at a time in which the relationship between corporations and political parties is undergoing a realignment, with the Republican Party becoming more of a home for self-identified working class voters and the Democratic Party becoming more of a home for more educated, more affluent, upper-middle income, high-income occupation, and stock-owning voters (Zacher Reference Zacher2024; Miller and Schofield Reference Miller and Schofield2008). This realignment hints at an historic change in the character of corporate political activity. For approximately forty years—from the mid-1970s to the mid-2010s—corporate political activity was characterized as lobbying for particularistic regulatory advantages and little else. However, some businesses now appear to have a supply of executives who see broad-based issues, such as health care, education, climate policy, and immigration, as areas on which they and their firms should engage, not just to make a profit for shareholders but also on behalf of a broader set of stakeholders. Even if this shift is still motivated by an overriding concern for improving the company’s bottom line, the perceptual shift toward companies engaging in broad-based issues and their leaders doing more engagement on their company’s behalf is significant and worthy of scholarly attention.
Competing Visions for Corporate Engagement
It is easy to understand why the public may have mixed feelings about the role of business interests in the political process. On one hand, corporations leveraging outsized economic resources to influence the government may be viewed as a violation of democratic norms of equality. On the other hand, in a capitalist democracy, voters may care about the success of private industry given its structural role in society (Lindblom Reference Lindblom1977). Most voters are either employed in private industry or are reliant on industry to generate returns on retirement investments, and as such they might reasonably want corporations to lobby lawmakers to prioritize corporate interests. Furthermore, in spite of any uneasiness about corporate dominance, it is difficult for voters to maintain principled views about the political process in cases when business interests happen to support the voters’ own policy goals (Graham and Svolik Reference Graham and Svolik2020). That is, voters may not like the idea of corporate political advocacy in theory, but they are not going to say no to it if the corporations are advocating for issues the voters support. In this particular study, we do not directly assess issue alignments between voters and specific companies. We focus our attention on how the mass public and business leaders generally view the role of business in society rather than on specific policy issues on which they may or may not align.
From the perspective of the leader of a business firm, the question of how businesses should be involved in politics is not just a question of ethical values, though values do affect leaders’ judgments. It is also a question of what is in the short-term and the long-term interests of the firm, of what is good for shareholders, and what is good for other stakeholders. A business leader’s judgment will vary by their personal views but also by the kind of firm they work for: a banker, a solar panel installer, a tech entrepreneur, a defense contractor, each will have different pressures from one another that contribute to their overall view of their firm’s relationship to political advocacy.
While the public and business leaders themselves may be internally conflicted, we aim to capture their overall stance toward corporate political advocacy. By asking anonymous survey questions and by using the same questions on a companion survey to the mass public, we attempt to glean from corporate leaders their general stance—their operating theory—toward corporate political activity. This can help other scholarship interpret downstream data, such as publicly accessible donation reports and lobbying activity of specific firms. The study can also help navigate between competing theories of what motivates corporate engagement, such as “upper echelons” and “stakeholder alignment” theories that depend heavily on business leaders’ own preferences and their perceptions of the preferences of other business stakeholders (Wowak, Busenbark, and Hambrick Reference Wowak, Busenbark and Hambrick2022; Hambrick and Wowak Reference Hambrick and Wowak2021; Jensen and Meckling Reference Jensen and Meckling1976; Hambrick and Mason Reference Hambrick and Mason1984).
What do we expect to find? This study is motivated by what seems to be a growing appetite among Democratic business elites, Democratic voters, and young people for a more assertive role for business in the political process on issues that affect the community, country, and planet. This role is summed up well by Winston, Doty, and Lyon (Reference Winston, Doty and Lyon2022): “businesses will have a net positive impact on the planet and its people by, among other things, taking responsibility for their full impacts, intended or not; serving all stakeholders, not just shareholders; helping to solve society’s biggest challenges; and enabling the shift to a thriving, regenerative economy” (1). We refer to this worldview as “stakeholder capitalism.”
To more precisely measure support for this worldview and to organize our findings, we must consider alternative visions for corporate involvement against which stakeholder capitalism can be compared. In total, we consider three simplified, ideal-type normative positions that a business leader or an ordinary citizen might hold. Before elaborating these positions, it is worth emphasizing that individual alignment with any normative position about the political role of business will be difficult to ascertain. Commitments to these values may vary depending on context, and respondents may be ambivalent or may not have thought much about the questions we ask. Accordingly, we approach this taxonomy of normative visions with modesty, especially as we connect them to concrete survey measures and respondent attitudes. Our aim is to measure alignment with normative visions among business elites versus the mass public and among Democrats versus Republicans. We will not here be able to explore every nuance of these worldviews, such as the root motivations among various subgroups or the relationship between these worldviews and specific policy positions. We simply aim to characterize a very general, stylized normative disposition toward the role of business elites in political advocacy.
Anti-Corporate Purists
The first normative perspective holds that corporations should not be involved in political advocacy, period. They should not lobby for particularistic demands or broad-based issues. They should neither influence politics through industry organizations nor attempt to mobilize their employees. They should stay out of politics altogether. Among whom might such a view be popular? For as long as business has been viewed as more of a Republican constituency than a Democratic one, anti-corporate purism has been more identified with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. At the elite level, for instance, Democratic lawmakers have tried to overturn Citizens United, a Supreme Court decision holding political spending as First Amendment protected speech, and as such protecting corporate political spending. A 2017 study of wealthy campaign contributors found that Democratic donors, but not Republican ones, also support overturning Citizens United (Hersh and Schaffner Reference Hersh and Schaffner2017). And the Democratic public feels the same away. The mass public, especially Democrats, do not trust business leaders, and they believe it is unfair for the wealthy to engage in political advocacy (Hersh Reference Hersh2023).
When we investigate support for corporate engagement in the political process, we focus on both the policy issues and the strategies that companies use. The anti-corporate purist vision would be consistent with those who want corporations to not be more engaged in politics in general, to weigh in on no issues, and to use no available method to influence the government.
Shareholder Capitalists
The second normative perspective believes businesses should make their views known only on how public policy affects their profits in the interests of their shareholders, to whom business leaders owe a fiduciary duty. This limited scope of advocacy is both good for the company and ethically defensible. How so? Public policy can affect how much tax revenue a government receives, and it can affect how employees (i.e., voters) fare in their livelihoods. Both of these are legitimate concerns of governments, so governments should welcome corporate lobbying. Furthermore, this view holds that what is good for the business is good for shareholders, and what is good for shareholders is good for the country. In other words, companies competing under the discipline of shareholder primacy generate the most good through efficient market clearing. What would indeed be a violation of democratic norms, under this view, is if companies take positions on broader policy issues where the link to their narrow profit-making interests is unclear. Writ large, this normative view is that companies should stay in their lanes and leave broad-based issues to the voters.
Who holds this stay-in-your-lane position? Economic sociologists have long ascribed this position to the class of business elites, suggesting that businesses act in politics only insofar as it helps “fend off challenges to their accumulation of profits” (Walker and Rea Reference Walker and Rea2014; Roy Reference Roy1981a, Reference Royb, Reference Roy1999; Prechel Reference Prechel2000; Perrow Reference Perrow2002). Thus, one could expect this vision to be more common among a sample of business elites than among the mass public. In recent years, in response to companies taking positions on broad-based issues, it is Republican politicians and thought-leaders who have articulated the stay-in-your-lane position most forcefully (Leonard Reference Leonard2022; Mangan Reference Mangan2022). Thus we expect Republicans to lean toward this normative vision, and business leaders more so than the mass public.
When investigating support for companies engaging on different policy areas, we expect the shareholder capitalist vision to be consistent with those who want corporations to weigh in on particularistic regulatory issues but not as much on broader economic, social, or environmental issues. This position does not address the strategies companies should use. A company could use a variety of strategies, including lobbying and donating but also mobilizing employees and other stakeholders. The key to this normative position is that the policy focus is most often narrowly confined to the financial interests particular to a firm rather than what is good for the community or for the country, among other stakeholders (Hertel-Fernandez Reference Hertel-Fernandez2018).
Stakeholder Capitalists
The third normative perspective endorses a broader, generally more active political role for business. To understand this perspective, first let us be clear on definitions. A firm’s stakeholders are its owners, but also customers, employees, vendors, as well as the broader community, state, nation, or even the whole world and its future inhabitants (Gura Reference Gura2020).Footnote 2
When we refer to stakeholder capitalism, we refer to the idea recently summarized by Lynne Paine (Reference Paine2023) of a firm that:
seeks not just to meet stakeholders’ basic claims but also to measurably improve their well-being. It comes in part from a belief that optimizing returns for shareholders over the past four decades has led many companies to underinvest in their other constituencies and has caused a disproportionate share of gains to go to the owners of capital (115).
Or consider another version of this claim, made by Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum (2020):
Business has now to fully embrace stakeholder capitalism, which means not only maximizing profits, but use their capabilities and resources in cooperation with governments and civil society to address the key issues of this decade (1).
Some tenets of stakeholder capitalism simply describe a firm’s internal processes, such as how it treats workers. For example, as employees have sought to exercise control over the political content of their respective company’s work, company leaders have pushed back insisting that the company maintain a degree of political neutrality, as was the case when Basecamp forbade employee discussion of politics at work and when Netflix requested employees uncomfortable with the company’s programming to leave the firm (Newton Reference Newton2021; Towey Reference Towey2022). While internal corporate matters are a critical component of the evolving discourse around stakeholder capitalism, our research is not focused on such matters of internal governance. Instead, we focus on the narrow portion of “stakeholder capitalism” exemplified by Mr. Schwab’s definition of firms engaging externally, such as through policy advocacy, on a wide array of policy areas, from economic development to workforce policy, from election reform to environmental policy. To the extent that policy initiatives are in the interest of a company’s stakeholders, such as its customers or community, then broad-based advocacy on these policy areas is consistent with the notion of stakeholder capitalism.
In addition to broad-based policy areas, we are also interested in firms’ strategies of political engagement. A variant of stakeholder capitalism, which Paine (Reference Paine2023) refers to as “structural stakeholderism,” calls for companies to incorporate representatives of stakeholders, such as employees and community-members, into corporate governance itself (see also Mazumder and Yan Reference Mazumder and Yan2023). It is from this line of thinking that we observe companies not just engaging in politics by having CEOs or paid lobbyists quietly meet with lawmakers but by mobilizing employees, customers, and community-members into its broad-based political advocacy. We consider democratized strategies of political advocacy to be consistent with the “structural” vision of stakeholder capitalism.
Among whom is stakeholder capitalism likely to win support as a normative ideal-type? In the past decade or so, corporate activism has been more pronounced on the political left (Barari Reference Barari2023). Business elites with stronger egalitarian values may see the stakeholder vision as more egalitarian because it takes into account employees, host communities, and other stakeholders, not just the particularistic economic interests of owners.
How do we distinguish these visions through the results of our surveys? As discussed earlier, we assess at a high level of abstraction the appetite for political engagement. This approach glosses over nuances about engagement that are worthy of future study. Take for example the issue of valence versus position issues (Stokes Reference Stokes1963). Some business leaders may say companies should get more involved on environmental issues. Among them, some may be more specific, and say they should only engage on valence issues on which there is broad consensus, such as ensuring clean water. This segment may refrain from position issues for which there is commonly accepted and clearly legible opposing positions, and for which taking a position is more likely to engender backlash. Other business leaders may embrace conflict. These distinctions are important for both characterizing and distinguishing how business leaders view the role of business in society. Nevertheless, we adopt a more general approach in order to emphasize the difference in attitudes toward broad-based business engagement, engagement specifically tied to the profit-generating work a business does, and complete non-engagement. Failing to distinguish between whether business leaders possess an appetite for valence or position issues does not prevent us from distinguishing those who wish more engagement from those who want no engagement at all on the part of business.
Our approach has clear limitations. For individuals who support corporate activism on a wide range of issues, we do not distinguish here between those whose motivations are narrowly tied to the business’s bottom line from those whose motivations are more expansive. Business people may see economic inequality, an erosion of democratic norms, climate change, or a rise in populism as engendering a tenuous future for their companies, and so it is in their strategic interest to get their companies involved on a broad range of issues. Stakeholder capitalists may believe that social, environmental, and democracy-enhancing policies are good for the business climate, for employee recruitment, or for public relations (Chatterji and Toffel Reference Chatterji and Toffel2019; Werner Reference Werner2012; Vogel Reference Vogel2005), all impacting the bottom line. Overt political engagement on broad-based issues may also be strategic maneuvers to preempt regulation (Bartley Reference Bartley2007, Werner Reference Werner2012, Parker Reference Parker2013). To the extent that stakeholder values overlap with shareholder values, there is some gray area between the stakeholder model and shareholder model (see also Hart and Zingales Reference Hart and Zingales2017).
A further complexity: those who believe in stakeholder capitalism may still endorse the prioritization of the interests of shareholders. As articulated by Klaus Schwab, stakeholder capitalism as a general attitude is not about ignoring shareholders, but rather integrating the interests of stakeholders other than shareholders into one’s decisions. Business leaders may act in their shareholder’s interests, but claim, genuinely or not, that they are acting on behalf of a broader set of stakeholders. Furthermore, those who believe in stakeholder capitalism may not believe business leaders and companies should be more engaged in politics in general, yet still believe that to the extent they do engage, they should be engaged on a broader set of policy areas.
In this study, we ask respondents about the appetite for business leaders to engage in politics generally, and narrow versus broad-based policy advocacy. For those who believe their firms should be engaged in broad-based advocacy, we treat this at least as tentative evidence of the stakeholder model, regardless of their motivations. Our measurement tool is not precise enough to decipher deeper nuances of their motivations.
Related, while popular coverage of stakeholder capitalism presumes a normatively left-positional stance, our application of stakeholder capitalism as an analytic frame for assessing the views of business leaders does not presume left- or right-positionality at all. For example, if a business leader wishes their company to oppose efforts to mitigate climate change, they may believe doing so is good for their company’s bottom line or in the broader interests of stakeholders, or some combination of both. What we measure in our study is not what motivates them or what side of an issue they are on, but on what kinds of issues and by what methods they seek to be politically engaged. If they want their firm to be involved in non-particularistic policy areas, we consider that more aligned with a stakeholder capitalism model. The stakeholder model clearly perceives a more expansive role for business in politics than a shareholder primacy model, and we expect those who embrace this stakeholder vision, particularly Democratic-aligned business leaders, to favor corporate engagement that extends beyond quietly lobbying for particularistic regulatory interests.
Data
To measure the comparative leanings of the mass public and among business elites toward these competing normative visions, we conducted two original surveys. The mass survey is a representative sample of ordinary Americans that was a module of the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), fielded in the fall of 2022. For some analysis, our interest is in the public’s view of how business, overall, should engage in political advocacy. For these analyses, we employ the full sample of 1,000 American adults. For other analyses, when we want to measure how ordinary workers think their own company should engage in politics, we restrict the sample to respondents who are currently employed in for-profit businesses. This subset is important because ordinary Americans may have different views of corporate engagement when they are thinking from the perspective of a voter, a customer, an employee, or any number of other identities. For some analyses, we want to focus on their identity as an employee.
Our survey of business leaders requires more explanation. First, why a survey? Non-survey-based data could inform us about the status quo of corporate political engagement. However, our main interest is in the appetite that corporate leaders have for how their firms should operate politically, and what these expressions of appetite reveal about how they view the role of business in society. For this kind of analysis, we needed to ask business leaders for their opinions.
The sampling frame for the elite survey was constructed through the use of Catalist’s microtargeting database, which contains records of all registered voters in the United States to which Catalist appends hundreds of demographic, behavioral, and geographic fields (Hersh Reference Hersh2015). We asked Catalist to identify all individuals who are registered to vote in the wealthiest census block groups in the U.S. (median household income at least $250,000) and for whom microtargeting records suggest are in the top 5% of earners nationally.Footnote 3 We further restricted the set of Americans to individuals who are in single-family homes with six or fewer registered voters at the address and for whom mailable addresses are available. Why single-family homes, and not apartments and condos? The rate of homeownership climbs rapidly as one ascends income quintiles (see Bostic and Surette Reference Bostic and Surette2011 and Chambers, Garriga, and Schlagenhauf Reference Chambers, Garriga and Schlagenhauf2009). Furthermore, Bramlett, Gimpel, and Lee (Reference Bramlett, Gimpel and Lee2011) suggests that being domiciled in wealthy neighborhoods may have a significant impact on ideological formation. If so, focusing on wealthy neighborhoods, often dominated by single-family homes, would yield representative respondents of these wealthy ideological clusters. From these households we selected the oldest registered voter between the ages of 35 and 65 (to exclude those likely to be retired or too young to be likely leaders in their firms). If Catalist had information from public records that this individual had a professional license (e.g., physician’s license, teacher’s license), the person was excluded and the next oldest person was selected (to concentrate the target group to businesspeople). These restrictions led to an initial listing of 61,130 registered voters across the country for whom we have their home addresses and other personal data.
The 61,130 individuals in the initial sampling frame are located in twenty-six states (plus Washington, DC). That is, half of the states have zero individuals who meet the criteria for inclusion, namely because they do not have well-to-do census block groups. Since our study focuses on the class of people who are most likely to be at the top of America’s business elite, we believe that respondents from these twenty-six states will be sufficiently representative without respondents from states without these top census block groups. More than half of the 61,130 are located in four states: New York, California, Connecticut, and Texas.
From the list of 61,130 we sampled a target set of 10,000 who would receive survey solicitations. We sampled different states at different rates so as to survey a broad range of individuals in different kinds of places. We oversampled individuals in states such as Nebraska, Utah, and Arizona, and undersampled individuals in states such as New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. In the analysis that follows, as noted, we weight the sample to be representative of the population of 61,130 individuals who fit the study’s criteria.
Individuals in the study were solicited by an initial postcard in June 2022. The postcard alerted them to the study and that they would receive a larger packet with a questionnaire in the coming weeks. The postcard also provided a link to a website where the recipient could learn more about the survey, read an informed consent document, and take the survey online. Two weeks later, the paper survey materials arrived, with a pre-paid return envelope. Several weeks later, a follow-up postcard arrived, offering a final reminder to take the survey. Data was collected from June to October 2022.
Representativeness, Response Rate, and Response Bias
Precisely defining “business elites,” as with precisely defining many categories of elites, is a fraught task (Kertzer and Renshon Reference Kertzer and Renshon2022). Our strategy was to target a set of wealthy Americans who, based on age and other public records, was likely to contain a high concentration of individuals who are in positions of authority in private-sector companies. The survey materials explicitly described this as a survey of economic leaders, and that the person was targeted for the survey because “your demographic profile suggests you work in a business or other organization and you may have some insights into how leaders do, and should, interact with the political process.” The cover letter and questionnaire can be found in the appendix. Because the sampling design does not ex ante exclude individuals who are not business elites, we use the questions on the survey to further isolate the group of business leaders. As detailed later, this strategy successfully yielded a sample of economic elites who have a window into corporate culture and corporate decision-making.
This sampling frame offers some advantages and some disadvantages compared to possible alternatives. For instance, one could identify records of managers of public firms, but the vast majority of businesses in the United States are not public firms. One could identify the records of political donors, but most people never donate politically: in 2020, about four million Americans made a political donation of more than $200, which compares with about twelve million citizen adults who are in the top 5% of income earners, and one need not be in the top 5% to donate $200.Footnote 4 In other words, most high-earners coming from the private sector are not contributing even a modest amount in political donations. In the appendix (see table S11), we discuss a comparison between the zipcodes of the 10,000 individuals we targeted versus the zip codes of Fortune 500 executives who are also political donors.
Here, the sampling frame excludes certain kinds of business leaders, such as those who are not 35–65 and those who do not live in single-family homes in well-to-do neighborhoods. For example, the sampling frame excludes individuals who might be small business owners and leaders in business civic organizations but who live in middle class neighborhoods or in poorer states. On the other hand, compared to studies that are restricted to public companies or to donors, individuals working at small- and medium-size firms are likely better represented here. As noted later, about one-third of our sample work for companies with more than 10,000 employees and another third work for companies with fewer than 100 employees, which mirrors the distribution for employees generally across the United States.
Though our design may lead to an unknown over-representation of Democrats or Republicans among business leaders writ large, our analysis assesses respondents by party cohort. Under the assumption that Republican/Democratic business leaders not in our sample would respond similarly to Republican/Democratic leaders in our sample, we can learn about how Democratic versus Republican business leaders understand the political values of their company and its stakeholders. For instance, on some questions that follow, we see that Democratic and Republican business leaders answer the same way (but distinctly from the mass public). On other questions, Democratic and Republican business leaders diverge. Where they diverge and where they agree informs us of how the broader set of business leaders in the population would likely answer these questions.
Elite studies always involve tradeoffs that affect representativeness. Here, the limitations are the assumption that the for-profit businesspeople who took the survey are sufficiently representative of the target population of “individuals who are in decision-making roles in businesses” and that the self-reported information from these business leaders reflects their true understanding of their firms.
Altogether, 9,998 individuals were solicited. Of these solicitations, 187 were returned to sender as undeliverable. We received 699 responses, yielding a response rate of 7%. This response rate is not atypical for elite surveys or mass surveys (Broockman, Kalla, and Sekhon Reference Broockman, Kalla and Sekhon2017). For instance it is the same as Broockman and Malhotra (Reference Broockman and Malhotra2020).
Table 1, column 1, shows gender, race, partisanship and age information for the unweighted sample of 9,998 individuals who were solicited to take the survey. Column 2 weights this population to be nationally representative (i.e., concentrated in states such as Texas, California, and New York). Notably, in both columns 1 and 2, the target population leans Democratic. That is, the typical registered voter of working age in a single family home in the richest neighborhoods is more likely to be a Democrat than a Republican. Column 3 shows the demographics of the raw set of respondents to the survey. Comparing column 1 to column 3 reflects response bias to the survey. The fourth column shows the sample characteristics after final weights are employed. The weights first account for the state oversamples and then account for response bias by calibrating to the target population on age, gender, race, and partisanship.
Demographics of target sample and of survey respondents
Notes: The target sample includes 9,998 wealthy Americans. Of the 699 respondents, demographic data is available for 695 of them. Gender, age, and partisanship originate primarily from state voter files and otherwise are predicted by Catalist. Racial information comes primarily from a Catalist prediction of race except in states where race is a public record. The final column is weighted and restricted to the 317 respondents who work in businesses.
Of all respondents, 25% are either retired, disabled, not currently employed, or government workers. Twenty percent are self-employed or independent contractors and 9% work in the non-profit sector. This leaves about half of the sample (47%, or 320 individuals) who work at for-profit companies. We restrict our study to these individuals.
While this sample size of for-profit leaders is small relative to typical surveys samples of the mass public, it is relatively large for elite surveys of this kind. By comparison, Page, Bartels, and Seawright (Reference Page, Bartels and Seawright2013) survey 83 wealthy individuals in one city, Rothman and Black (Reference Rothman and Black1999) survey 242 upper and middle management, and Nownes and Aitalieva (Reference Nownes and Aitalieva2013) survey 92 business leaders. Column 5 in table 1 shows demographics for the subsample. The business people in the sample are similar on most dimensions to the weighted target population (column 2) except they are far more likely to be male, which is expected given that those in corporate leadership positions are disproportionately male (for example, see Jones Reference Jones2017).
The private sector respondents who took our survey report job titles consistent with our goal of reaching business elites. As table 2 shows, the most common title is a C-suite title, such as chief operating officer. Also common is vice president and manager. Ten percent of the responses come from CEOs and 6% from presidents. In a separate question, we asked if the respondent manages others in their company: 84% said yes. We asked about income level. The typical respondent who was willing to report income earns $250,000–$500,000 from their job (i.e., just their share of a family income). The median respondent reports working 50 hours a week and having worked for their current company for 10 years.
Title and industry of private sector respondents
Note: Re-coding of open-ended response for job title and industry. Some respondents fall into multiple categories of titles.
The survey captures individuals in a wide range of companies. Almost half (47%) work for companies with more than 1,000 employees, with one-third working at companies with more than 10,000 employees. But another third (32%) work for companies with fewer than 100 employees.Footnote 5 As table 2 notes, the business leaders are distributed across several broad categories of industry, with the largest shares in the “FIRE” industries of finance, insurance, and real estate and in technology. About one in five respondents selected industries not individually listed, such as aerospace, agriculture, automotive, construction, government contracting, logistics, manufacturing, oil and gas, shipping, and utilities. These miscellaneous industries tended to have the highest concentration of Republican identifiers.
Results
The Policy Scope of Corporate Engagement
Before we examine how business leaders and ordinary workers think their own company should be engaged in the political process, we measure the magnitude of their appetite for national business leaders as a whole to be involved in politics in general. We asked, “Thinking in general about leaders of major corporations in the United States, how actively should they be participating in politics and in advocating/lobbying for policy positions?”
In the top of figure 1, we focus just on partisans (including leaners), and show how they answer the question on the four-category scale. The differences between mass and elite, and between Democratic and Republican are clearly visible. Democrats and Republicans in the mass public answer that corporate leaders should rarely or not at all be involved in political advocacy. And in both the mass public and among the business elites, it is Republicans who are less enthusiastic about the leaders of major corporations exercising political participation than Democrats. In the bottom of the graph, we collapse the scale to two categories: those who want corporate leaders to be somewhat or very involved versus rarely or not at all. The majority of business leaders, of all political stripes, say corporate leaders should be somewhat or very involved, more than two times the rate of agreement in the mass public. Among both elites and the mass public, Democrats are significantly more likely to endorse the political engagement of corporate leaders.
How actively should leaders of major corporations in the United States be participating in politics and advocating/lobbying for policy positions?
Note: CES (mass public) responses include 998 respondents, with 418 Democrats and 267 Republicans (leaners included). The elite respondents include 282 business leaders who work in for-profit firms, with 136 Democrats and 89 Republicans. In the lower plot, means and 95% CIs are shown.
Next, we assess the breadth of desired policy involvement by drilling down into involvement on eight specific policy areas. We ask, “Thinking in general about leaders of major corporations in the United States, do you think they should engage in political advocacy/lobbying on any of the following policy issues?” The options were as follows:
-
Specific business regulations that directly impact their company or organization’s work
-
Economic policy related to the local economy
-
Economic policy related to the national economy
-
Trade policy / foreign policy
-
Social policy
-
Workforce policy
-
Environmental policy
-
Election administration
We use this question to operationalize the distinction between views that are anti-corporate purist, shareholder capitalist, and the stakeholder capitalist. Of the respondents who did not respond “I don’t know,” respondents who select the first, and only the first, option take a view most consistent with shareholder capitalism. Companies should only advocate on issues directly related to their work. Respondents who select none of these categories take a view most consistent with the anti-corporate purists. And those who select one or more other categories, i.e., those who wish leaders to engage on at least one issue that is not those specifically related to their company’s work, have views most consistent with the stakeholder capitalist model. Again, as noted earlier, these categories are oversimplified and there is gray area between them. As a first cut, table 2 summarizes the simplified views of business leaders versus the mass public.
In total, 38% of mass respondents select none of the above issues, 49% of the mass respondents choose at least one broad-based issue, and only 13% of the mass public select particularistic issues but none of the other issues. The “shareholder capitalism” model, as suggested by an appetite for engagement on particularistic issues, is least popular. The public is split between those who want corporate leaders to engage on no issues and those who want corporate leaders to engage on at least one broader issue. Note here that despite half of mass respondents endorsing the leaders of major U.S. corporations being active on at least one broad-based issue, only about one-quarter of mass respondents wish these leaders to be somewhat or very involved in politics generally (as noted in figure 1). This seeming contradiction may be seen as a distinction between the magnitude of involvement, and the breadth and character of involvement. While respondents may not wish for greater involvement from U.S. corporate leaders in general, they may still wish for those leaders to be involved with a specific broad-based issue area.
The business leaders answer this question quite differently from the mass public. Only about 10% say that corporate leaders should be involved on none of these issues (compared to almost 40% of the mass public). A similar percentage think that companies should only advocate on particularistic items. Overwhelmingly business leaders endorse engagement on broader-based issues. But which issues?
As figure 2 shows, there are clear differences between how business leaders and the mass public envision engagement from corporate leaders and between how Democrats and Republicans within those classes envision corporate leader engagement. Support among the mass public is low for U.S. corporate leaders engaging on any given broad-based issue (although as noted in table 3 nearly half of the mass public supports at least one broad based issue). While there are a couple of issues where Democratic respondents are somewhat more interested in engaging—namely environmental policy and social policy—no policy area other than specific regulations that directly impact a firm’s work achieves much more than 30% support from any partisan cohort.
Should leaders of major corporations in the United States engage in political advocacy/lobbying on any of the following policy issues?
Note: Means and 95% CI shown for business leaders in for-profit companies (N
$ = $
265) and for the mass public (N
$ = $
746).
Simplified categorization of business leaders and mass public worldview
Elite respondents are quite unified in the sense that some 80% of elite respondents believe corporate leaders should engage on at least one of the broader issues, a far higher share than among the mass public. Even on something like environmental policy—which elite Democrats like more than elite Republicans—more Republican business elites think corporate leaders should engage than do Democrats in the mass public. On all the issues, the gaps between the elite respondents and mass respondents are bigger than any partisan divide within each cohort.
While almost half of the general public endorses leaders of major corporations engaging in political advocacy on at least one broad-based issue area, only one-quarter of the general public wishes these leaders to be somewhat or very active in advocating/lobbying for policy positions in general. This general, non-issue-specific, lack of appetite for business leaders to be active appears consistent with the normative worldview that business leaders should stay out of politics. Note, however, that this evidence departs from other recent studies that show Democrats, in particular, are enthusiastic about corporate leader activism. For instance, Hersh (Reference Hersh2023) finds that the majority of Democrats support corporate leader activism on issues such as climate change, race relations, income inequality, parental leave, and health care. Or consider a 2021 poll from the University of Massachusetts, in which Democrats expressed overwhelming support for corporations (but not necessarily their leaders) expressing opposition to voting restrictions (Nteta Reference Nteta2021). The core difference between these past examples and the present study is that here the policy areas are broad (e.g., workforce policy, rather than paid leave) and have no ideological valence (e.g., economic policy, rather than income inequality). Furthermore, these questions are not asking about corporate involvement on specific salient issues—a voting rights bill, a Supreme Court abortion decision, a police brutality case. When framed in these broad and neutral categories meant to assess general attitudes toward the role of business in society, the public appears generally unenthusiastic about business leader engagement.
The analysis so far asks about how “leaders of major corporations in the United States” should be involved, but not those of one’s own firm. Furthermore, when asked about leaders of major corporations, a respondent may have thought about business leaders engaging independently of their firms rather than on behalf of their firms. Now, we turn to the more specific question of how the leaders of one’s own company should engage on behalf of the company.
Consider figure 3. On the left side, we report responses to the question, “If your company or organization engages in policy advocacy, what policy issue(s) does it focus on? Select all that apply.” On the right side of figure 3, we measure the elite sample’s appetite for more engagement from their firms’ leaders, which may include themselves. We asked: “Do you think your company or organization should engage more or less on the following policy issues, compared to their current level of involvement?” We create a 3-category scale where
$ -1 $
equals less engagement,
$ 0 $
equals the same level, and
$ 1 $
equals more engagement.
Status quo policy areas of political engagement versus elite appetite
Note: Means and 95% CI for sample of business leaders working in for-profit companies. N
$ = $
251 for status quo (left plot). In right plot, observations vary from 196 (in the case of election administration) to 248 (in the case of specific regulations), on account of “don’t know” responses. Right plot uses 3-category scale of -1 (want less), 0 (want same), and 1 (want more).
We learn that most business leaders (of all parties) think the status quo in their company is to engage in advocacy on particularistic issues but not on other issues. About 20%–30% of leaders say their company engages on other issues such as economic policy or workforce policy. Notice there are only modest differences by party affiliation on the left side of figure 3 regarding the status quo. Big differences in perception of the status quo would mean either that the Democratic and Republican leaders in our sample are in different kinds of firms with respect to political engagement or that they perceive their firm’s engagement differently depending on their own personal ideological lens. But neither of those possibilities seem consistent with the result on the left of figure 3, as leaders of different parties answer the question about the status quo in similar ways.Footnote 6
On every single issue except for “election administration,” the business leaders as a group want more engagement from their firms. On half the issues—narrow regulations, local economic policy, national economic policy, trade and foreign policy—Democratic and Republican elites are on the same page. On social, environmental, and workforce policy, Democratic business leaders want more engagement and Republican business leaders want the same or less. Election administration is in its own category as it is both the least common area and the least popular among elites of both parties, though there is a partisan division on this issue as well.
In the appendix, we show two regression tables of the analysis in figure 3. In table SI2, we measure support for more or less engagement by party affiliation and age. We employ industry fixed-effects and a control variable for large corporations. Contrary to our expectations, younger business leaders are not more enthusiastic about company advocacy on broad-based policy issues. In fact, on several issues, older respondents are enthusiastic. Controlling for age and industry, it is Democratic identification that correlates with interest in more advocacy on 6 out of 8 issues. In table SI3, we measure elite respondents and mass respondents who are employees in for-profit companies. We see no consistent evidence that younger workers or Democrats in the mass public are interested in increased business engagement. This evidence, combined with the evidence about the mass public in figures 1 and 2, demonstrate a lack of enthusiasm for business engagement. The public’s attitude as measured by these responses leans toward the anti-corporate purist view.
Whereas the mass public opposes a greater role for business in any given broad-based policy area, business leaders articulate an appetite for more engagement both on particularistic issues and on broad-based issues. It is certainly not the case that Democratic business leaders want just broad-based engagement and not particularistic engagement. They want more of both kinds of engagement. Republican business leaders also endorse a greater engagement for their own firms (and national firms) in economic policy, but not social and environmental policy. Thus, we see a lack of demand from the mass public for non-particularistic engagement but a clear appetite to supply such engagement from business elites, particularly Democratic ones, whose responses lean toward a stakeholder capitalist vision of engagement that their own company and major US corporations be more active on environmental and social policy beyond merely the particularistic.
The Strategies of Corporate Engagement
We now turn our attention to the strategies of business engagement in politics. Companies have traditionally engaged in political advocacy behind the scenes, such as through lobbyists, campaign contributions, industry groups, and by executives quietly meeting with lawmakers. We would characterize these as traditional strategies of business engagement. Non-traditional strategies are those that engage employees and customers into political mobilization.
In our survey, we asked about traditional and non-traditional strategies of engagement because a normative vision of stakeholder capitalism endorses the view that a corporate mission ought to incorporate the interests of stakeholders such as employees and customers. Some companies incorporate stakeholder interests by mobilizing them into political causes or at least endorsing their participation in causes.
We asked elite respondents about the status quo in their firms and their appetite for change. Specifically, we asked: “Do executives at your firm typically engage in the following activities on behalf of the company or organization?” The options we gave are as follows:
-
Charitable donations
-
Political donations
-
National-level policy advocacy/lobbying
-
State-level policy advocacy/lobbying
-
Local-level policy advocacy/lobbying
-
Supply chain decisions based on politics/public policy positions
-
Active participation in industry organizations
-
Turn away customers who have views unaligned with company’s values
Notice that unlike the questions in figure 3, we ask about executives at one’s firm acting on behalf of the firm rather than the company overall. There are two reasons for this wording choice. The first is that companies may be prohibited by law from certain actions, such as political donations. The second is that business leaders often act on behalf of their company under the guise of personal political engagement. They may do so because a particular form of engagement is prohibited by the company, or because they fear backlash if the company were to be seen doing that form of engagement. Either way, this question permits us to focus our descriptive attention on the appetite our elite respondents’ possess for the leaders of their company acting in their more wide-ranging individual capacity on behalf of their company.
The left side of figure 4 has the results regarding the status quo. Two findings stand out. Most clearly, business leaders say their firms’ leaders engage primarily in only two of these practices: charitable donations and active participation in industry groups. The category of charitable donations merits reflection. For some, charitable donations may mean engagement on behalf of the company’s reputation or in the interests of the company’s community. For others, it may mean strategic giving for the purpose of political cultivation, as corporate philanthropy may be another means for forging relationships with politicians and other political elites. We do not distinguish these motivations here.
Status quo strategies of political engagement versus elite appetite
Note: Means and 95% CI shown. Observations range from 199 to 260 on account of “don’t know” responses. Right plot uses 3-category scale of -1 (want less), 0 (want same), and 1 (want more).
The other options (except for turning away customers) are claimed by 20%–40% of the sample as strategies currently employed by executives at their business. Second, unlike in the examination of issue areas of engagement, on which Democratic and Republican business leaders had similar perceptions, here we see substantial divergence. On a few of these items, such as national lobbying, Democratic business leaders are significantly more like to claim their firm’s leaders currently engages in these practices than Republicans.
And yet, as the right side of figure 4 regarding appetite shows, there is mostly an elite consensus across political lines about which of these strategies corporate leaders should do more and less of. In addition to lobbying, Democratic and Republican business leaders are interested in more charitable giving and more work with industry groups. The one area where there is clear partisan divergence is in turning away customers with unaligned values. About 20% of Democratic businesspeople say their company’s leaders do this now, and some are eager for more use of this method. Republican business leaders see this hardly at all as a status quo strategy, and would want even less of it regardless.
Part of what may lead to partisan divergence on the question of turning away customers is that Democratic business leaders are disproportionately in industries such as law and consulting in which they have different relationships with their customers/clients than in industries such as retail or real estate. In appendix table SI4, we show results controlling for age, industry, and size of firm. Indeed, the biggest appetite for turning away customers comes from the law and consulting fields. Even so, Democratic business leaders are more enthusiastic than Republicans about this strategy. Appendix table SI5 shows a comparison between how elites and private sector workers in the mass public answer these questions. The appetite of business leaders for more lobbying and engagement through industry groups is not shared by members of the mass public.
The appendix tables reveal another finding that is visible in figure 4 but tested formally in the regression models: when it comes to lobbying and working with industry groups, we see evidence of partisan versus nonpartisan polarization. Democratic and Republican business leaders are both more enthusiastic about these strategies of engagement than independents.
We next asked about a broader set of civic engagement strategies, including those that promote activism among stakeholders such as customers and employees. We asked, “Which of these strategies should your company or organization’s executives use when engaging in the political process?” The options we gave were as follows:
-
Encourage employees to be politically active
-
Give paid time off for employees to be politically active
-
Encourage customers to be politically active
-
Executives in my company/organization should meet with lawmakers
-
Ordinary workers in my company/organization should meet with lawmakers
-
Professional lobbyists hired by my company/organizations should meet with lawmakers
-
None
Figure 5 shows results both for the business elite respondents and for mass public workers in for-profit firms respondents. Ordinary workers as well as Republican business elites mostly check “none.” Most Democratic business leaders check one or more of these strategies. Strategies that are employee-facing are more popular among Democrats than Republicans across both cohorts—elites and mass public workers—though in neither cohort do the majority support employee mobilization. Strategies that are customer-facing are deeply unpopular with business elite respondents. Strategies that leverage elites, such as executives and lobbyists meeting with lawmakers, are not polarizing by party but do divide business leaders and mass public workers. For instance, about one-third of Democratic and Republican business leaders think executives in their firms should be meeting with lawmakers, whereas only about 5% of mass public workers think so. As for why the percentage of respondents who think their firm should engage in lobbying is lower than those in figure 4 who wish their firm to do more lobbying, recall that we are distinguishing between a binary desire for the use of a method in figure 5 and the appetite for greater or lesser use of a method relative to the status quo in figure 4.
Interest in strategies of political advocacy
Note: CES (mass public) responses include 291 respondents who work in for-profit firms. The elite responses include 276 business leaders who work in for-profit firms. Means and 95% CIs shown. Due to a programming error, the CES did not offer mass respondents the “mobilize customers” option.
In sum, the evidence suggests that while business leaders want advocacy on more kinds of issues, including broad-based issues, they do not want advocacy through non-traditional methods such as engaging employees or customers. If their firms’ leaders were to engage in political advocacy, business leaders offer the most support for working with industry groups or for executives quietly meeting with lawmakers. Thus, we see almost no mass demand for non-traditional strategies and almost no elite supply of business leaders who want to employ non-traditional strategies.
The Consequences of Corporate Engagement
As one final analysis, we wanted to know whether business leaders think more engagement in politics is good or bad for their business. We asked: “If your company were to become more active in the political process, how do you think that would affect the following: “profitability, employee morale, brand favorability, and your own view of the company.” Respondents could select “make worse,” “make better,” “no effect,” or “don’t know.” We code make worse as
$ -1 $
, no effect as
$ 0 $
, and make better as
$ 1 $
.
As figure 6 shows, Republican business leaders think that more active political engagement is neutral to bad for the company, negatively affecting profitability, morale, brand favorability, and their own view of the company. Democratic business leaders also think more active engagement will be a net loss for profitability. Democratic business leaders are neutral on the effects of more active political engagement on morale and brand favorability. In spite of these pessimistic expectations, Democratic business leaders say that more political engagement will improve their own view of their company. In a regression analysis (appendix table SI6) we show that there is no significant relationship between wanting more kinds of political engagement and believing that more political engagement is good for the firm.
Perceived consequences of increased corporate political engagement
Note: Means and 95% CI shown. Observations counts range from 184 to 221 on account of “don’t know” responses.
This finding is puzzling in light of the previous findings of this paper. Why would business leader respondents advocate for greater engagement if they also believe it would be adverse to profitability, employee morale, brand favorability, and their own view of the company? One possibility is that respondents are interpreting this last question as meaning the firm is getting more publicly active on issues. And as noted earlier, business leaders do not favor the more public forms of activism. Of course, our survey does not query the motivations for business leader preferences, appetites, and attitudes, but we encourage further research in this area.
Conclusion
Since “stakeholder capitalism” endorses the view that companies and their leaders take seriously the interests of their employees, customers, and the broader community, one might reasonably think that it is employees and the public demanding that companies and their leaders take a leading role in advocating for broad-based issues. While partisans in the public tend to endorse corporate leader activism on specific policy positions if they are aligned with them on those issues, our research here suggests a real lack of demand from the public for business leaders to be involved in policy advocacy in general. That is, a Democrat in the mass public might endorse business leaders taking Democratic-aligned positions on climate change, but when asked if these leaders should be involved in environmental policy more generally, the answer is no. To the extent there is a demand for a “stakeholder capitalism” role for business in society as driven by business leaders, it does not seem to be coming from the majority view of the mass public or employees in for-profit firms. Certainly, there may be loud voices within firms that demand deeper corporate engagement on issues, just as some members of the mass public also articulate such a view. But the majority of the public does not want business leaders engaging on any set of social or economic issue areas, nor do they want business leaders mobilizing workers or customers into political engagement.
Responses from business elites, on the other hand, more often suggest a lean toward “stakeholder capitalism,” certainly more so than a lean toward a purist anti-corporate view or a “shareholder capitalism” view. Both Democratic and Republican business leaders want their firms’ leaders to engage on particularistic issues, but they want their firms’ leaders to engage more broadly too. They specifically want company leaders to be more engaged in areas related to the local and national economy. Democrats also want engagement on social, workforce, and environmental issues. The general mismatch between the lack of demand for engagement on the part of business leaders versus the appetite to supply not just particularistic, but broad-based engagement from the business leaders themselves bears several implications for how business is conducted. Business leaders may want to have a hand in broad-based policy, and may receive public support where their stance on a specific issue aligns with the public, but may yet have to convince the public that this engagement is in general per se merited. Furthermore, hardly anyone, elite or mass public respondents, wants business leader political engagement to involve customers or employees. Business leaders still want quiet engagement, while the mass public tends towards no engagement at all. We also find that younger respondents, whether they are business leaders or members of the mass public, do not possess a greater appetite for engagement, contrary to our expectations.
The differences in attitudes between Democratic and Republican elites may be somewhat superficial in the sense that Republicans may express wariness over advocacy on social issues on account of the ideological valence of those issues, but to the extent that issues implicate the local or national economy (which of course they do), then Republicans would also endorse greater engagement on the issues just as Democrats do (see figure 2). Without having measured the fear of backlash on specific issues, the evidence presented here demonstrates significant generalized consensus among elites for more active engagement in politics on the part of business leaders beyond narrow, particularistic interests.
Nevertheless, we acknowledge that the business leaders we study are sensitive to the risks of political engagement on behalf of their companies. They have diverse constituencies and are aware that political engagement can backfire. It is likely for this reason that leaders are most comfortable wading into broad-based political issues through third-party intermediaries, such as industry organizations. It is an open question whether such groups, ranging from chambers of commerce to trade associations, broaden the scope of their advocacy to meet the apparent demand for aspects of stakeholder capitalism among business elites. Unfortunately for scholars, corporate leader engagement as filtered through third parties is difficult to monitor. It turns out that the same secrecy that allows companies to quietly pursue their particularistic financial interests without facing public backlash also allows companies to do the same for broad-based economic, social, and environmental interests.
There are a number of questions we have not answered here, such as whether results would change if the survey was conducted a year or two later or if it used slightly different survey questions or a different sampling frame. Alternate approaches to distinguishing between shareholder interests and stakeholder interests may surface more or less conceptual gray area between these normative models. We encourage further exploration to elicit views on whose interests drive an appetite for greater business engagement. We have also only explored one dimension of the notion of “stakeholder capitalism” related to external civic and political advocacy. We encourage future work to continue to ask the kinds of questions we have developed and to expand on them, including on surveys of workers and managers at individual firms.
Our data also do not directly address the motivations business leaders have for arriving at their stated positions. For business leaders who think their class should be more engaged, to what extent are they motivated by moral values, short-term economic interests, long-term economic interests, or pressure from stakeholders? The more that these motivations are connected with concrete business objectives, the more likely, it seems, for these business leaders to translate their appetite for action into action itself.
These results suggest that the United States may now be in a different era than was dominant from the 1970s–2010s and perhaps more consistent with the post-war style of corporate civic engagement. Corporate elites do not want their company leaders to stay wholly out of politics or to restrict their advocacy to particularistic lobbying. They want these leaders to be more involved in policy on a range of issues. This change may be connected to a perceived partisan realignment underway in major corporations (toward the Democrats) and to a contemporary status quo in which more business leaders understand the functioning of the government as bearing directly on their own interests and the interests of their firms and stakeholders.
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592725000775.
Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on drafts, the authors thank Jeffrey Berry, Josh Hochberg, Max Kagan, Brian Schaffner, Vineeta Vijayaraghavan, Sam Zacher, and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan. Eitan Hersh was a 2022 Emerson Collective Fellow and thanks Emerson Collective for the time, community, and feedback that came via the fellowship that supported this work. Eitan Hersh also thanks Leadership Now for financial support for this project.
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