Putting the Politics Into Corporate Political Activity: A Variance Decomposition Analysis of Firm–Government Interactions Across Political Contexts
通过对2001-2019年美国上市公司数据的方差分解，分析行业、企业和高管因素对企业政治活动（游说支出、竞选捐款）和政府行动（政府合同）的影响，发现企业因素解释最多方差，但政治情境（如政党控制）会改变这一模式。
Despite the wealth of theorizing about the relationship between business and government, research on corporate political activity (CPA) has yet to comprehensively consider how political context (e.g., party ideology and the degree of united or divided party government control) may shift the salience of how CPA materializes across industry-, firm-, and executive-level factors, which can shed light on the level of effects that appear to matter more (or less). To advance our understanding, we conducted a variance decomposition analysis on U.S. public firms (2001–2019), exploring the relative effect of each level on firm (lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions) and government actions (government contracts), and parsing our sample based on whether key government branches are Democrat- or Republican-controlled. We generally found that firm effects explain the most variance, followed by industry, while executive effects explain the least. However, this pattern shifts notably when considering political context across our sample period. As such, our findings have important implications for future CPA research and theorizing.