No abstract

The importance of overt levers of business political influence, notably campaign donations and lobbying, has been overemphasized. Using executive branch policymaking during the Obama administration as a case study, this article shows that those paths of influence are often not the most important. It places special emphasis on the structural power that large banks and corporations wield by virtue of their control over the flow of capital and the consequent effects on employment levels, credit availability, prices, and tax collection. At times, business disinvestment, combined with demands for government policy reforms, constitutes a conscious “capital strike,” which has the potential to shape political appointments, legislation, and policy implementation. At other times, the threat of disinvestment, the hint of a drop in “business confidence,” or rhetoric about job creation is sufficient to achieve those objectives. The present analysis has important implications for our understanding of political power and social change in capitalist economies.

Do large corporations respond to social movement protests following a firm-centric rationale or do they develop their strategies relationally? If they do so relationally, do corporate networks help foster class-wide unity in their responses to protests? We address these questions through an examination of protests against U.S. Fortune 500 firms. We incorporate data on board of director interlocks and corporate involvement in policy planning organizations to test the effect of corporate networks on firm behavior. Utilizing firm- and dyadiclevel analyses, we show that firms more embedded in the capitalist class concede to protest demands less often while retaliating against protesters more. However, this resistance is moderated by the ideologies of the networks in which the firm is embedded: firms connected to relatively liberal groups instead display the reverse pattern. These findings suggest class-wide networks shape corporate responses to protests in ideologically identifiable ways and enable greater unity between these firms.

No abstract

What propels the involvement of large U.S. corporations into statewide voter referendums? We test the argument of whether corporate political behavior is characterized by firm-level factors or more relational sectoral and classwide networks. Using the 2012 ballot proposition to mandate labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods in California as a case, we analyze corporate donation patterns. We find that while individual interests are significant predictors of involvement, these are eclipsed by relational factors. Corporate embeddedness in sectoral and classwide networks are strong predictors of political involvement, fostering greater opposition to GM food labeling. In addition, using dyadic analysis, we find these networks enable greater unity among these corporations. These findings have implications for our understanding of corporate involvement in voter referendums and on the collective political action of large corporations.