Interlocks, PACs, and Corporate Conservatism

Interest groups: A survey of empirical models that try to assess their influence

“…For instance, Gopoian (1984) finds oil PACs to be more ideologically (support) oriented than defense PACs. Similarly, Clawson and Neustadtl (1988) find the contribution strategy to be more pragmatic (exchange) if there is a high government involvement in the PAC's industry.…”

Corporate Unity in American Trade Policy: A Network Analysis of Corporate-Dyad Political Action

“…Given that the firms were not selected on the basis of a random sample, some may take issue with the employment of statistical significance tests. While several have analyzed the political activities of the Fortune 500, issues pertaining to the interpretability of the population's parameters have received little attention in the literature (Boies 1989;Clawson and Neustadtl 1989;Domhoff 2006). Boies (1989), e.g., examined the PAC contributions of the entire Fortune 500 but did not offer justification for his employment of statistical significance tests.…”

“…With more current data, we are prepared to engage debates about corporate political action that have, for the most part, relied on data from the 1980s. Indeed, much of the debate on corporate political action has relied on a single form of political behavior-usually political action committee (PAC) contributions or congressional testimony (Burris 1987(Burris , 2005Clawson and Neustadtl 1989;Mizruchi 1992;Su et al 1995). We expand our empirical lens to include multiple measures of corporate political behavior and link substantively and conceptually old questions in political sociology to a trade policy literature that rarely considers the collective agency of corporations.…”

When theory meets methods: the naissance of computer assisted corporate interlock research

“…Likewise, Val Burris (1987Burris ( , 1991 initially found no meaningful relationship between interlocks and campaign contributions, but in a later study concluded that interlocks did affect the corporate elite's political behaviour. Clawson and Neustadtl (1989), however, found a significant (negative) correlation between the number of interlocks and donations to conservative political action committees. They found a positive relation between the number of interlocks and donations to incumbent members of Congress.…”