Seth Wenig/AP Photo
With each passing day, more and more Republicans, it seems, are grousing about corporations. Those damned CEOs are concerned about racial and gender equity, or abortion rights or climate change or science or some other woke falsification.
In fact, however, the share of corporate pooh-bahs who fret about microaggressions has been growing more micro. A study published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) tracked the partisan voter registrations of CEOs and other top executives at the S&P 1500 over the past decade and a half and found that the percentage of Republicans had risen from 63 percent in 2008 to 68 percent in 2020. Notwithstanding the presidency of Donald Trump, that is, the share of top executives who identified themselves as Republicans rose to more than two-thirds in those years.
The paper—by Vyacheslav Fos of Boston College, and Elisabeth Kempf and Margarita Tsoutsoura of the business schools of, respectively, the University of Chicago and Cornell University—also found that both Democratic and Republican executives directed some of their campaign contributions to candidates of the other party, in the time-honored tradition of currying favor with whoever’s in power. (That’s my own causal analysis, not that of the paper’s authors.) More interestingly, it found that the partisan composition of corporate leadership teams had become significantly more uniform since 2008: Firms with Republican leaders contained fewer and fewer Democrats in the leadership team over the course of those years, while firms with Democratic leaders contained correspondingly fewer Republicans. The growing partisan tilt of C-suite teams also reflected the partisan tilt of the broader electorate in their region: more Republican in Texas, more Democratic in California.
In one sense, this is nothing new: Major shareholders and executives have flocked to (and often owned outright) the Republican Party since private corporations first arose in the aftermath of the Civil War. There have always been variations, of course: Earlier NBER papers have documented how Wall Street support for Democrats began increasing in the 1990s, attracted by the party’s pro–Wall Street agenda during the Clinton presidency and repelled by the Republicans’ troglodytery on social and cultural issues.
What’s beyond the scope of this new NBER paper is any investigation of the ideologies that inform CEOs’ partisan affiliations. It’s clear, however, that while Democratic executives may be committed to, say, greater gender equity and some mitigation of the climate crisis, the percentage who actually want to share even a little intra-corporate power with their employees likely hovers around the 1 percent mark. Exceptions to this rule are rare enough to merit coverage. As I noted last month, Microsoft President Brad Smith recently declared that the company wouldn’t oppose its workers’ efforts to unionize, sensing, perhaps, that this departure from the corporate norm might actually help recruit and retain young techies. A handful of major investors—Seattle’s Nick Hanauer and, judging by this interview posted today at Prospect publishing partner Capital & Main, Silicon Valley’s Roy Bahat—are clearly pro-union. For now, though, such figures remain unicorns even in all-Democratic executive suites.
So is wokery running amok in America’s corporate boardrooms? Clearly, not in at least two-thirds of them. And in almost all of the remaining one-third, being pro-woke doesn’t yet mean being pro-worker.
