IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/bjposi/v55y2025ip-_99.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Principled Pragmatism: Big Business and Campaign Contributions After January 6

Author

Listed:
  • Meli, Amy
  • Gawehns, Florian

Abstract

Corporations use financial contributions to gain access to influential policymakers. How do these actors respond when officeholders violate widely held norms, such as accepting the results of free and fair elections? We argue that businesses are sensitive to norm violations because they balance their economic interests with accountability demands from employees and other stakeholders. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that legislators who supported Donald Trump’s false claims about a ‘stolen election’ experienced a significant decline in contributions from Fortune 500 PACs in 2021 and 2022. Additionally, our analysis reveals that companies continue to contribute more to party leaders and members of key committees, consistent with our hypothesis. These findings suggest that corporations are willing to balance the interests of their two audiences by sending signals of disapproval towards those who violate established norms while continuing to lobby key lawmakers.

Suggested Citation

  • Meli, Amy & Gawehns, Florian, 2025. "Principled Pragmatism: Big Business and Campaign Contributions After January 6," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 55, pages 1-1, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:55:y:2025:i::p:-_99
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0007123425000389/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:55:y:2025:i::p:-_99. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jps .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.