The Two Faces of Capital: Corporations and Individual Capitalists as Political Actors
By V. Burris. American Sociological Review, 2001
158 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Widespread access to public records of campaign contributions by corporate political action committees (PACs) have made these the preferred data for analyzing political partisanship within the capitalist class. By comparison, data on political contributions by individual capitalists were, until recently, difficult to obtain and rarely subjected to systematic study. Important differences are demonstrated between these two forms of capitalist political action by directly comparing the campaign contributions of 592 individual capitalists with the contributions of the 394 major corporations with which those capitalists were associated. Campaign contributions by individual capitalists follow a logic different from that of corporate PACs. Corporations are generally more interested in buying influence with incumbents, while individual capitalists are more concerned with bolstering the election prospects of favored candidates. By providing a more direct measure of capitalists’ political preferences, the analysis of campaign contributions by individual capitalists clarifies theoretical questions that remain unresolved in the research based on corporate PACs. Variables that elude measurement when corporations are the units of analysis (e.g., ethnicity) are shown to have important consequences for capitalist political partisanship.
Subfields: Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d897485efec08931062cf619546bb64b10ff44e4
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Citations in the corpus
- The Other Pathway to the Boardroom: Interpersonal Influence Behavior as a Substitute for Elite Credentials and Majority Status in Obtaining Board Appointments (2006, unknown): “…greater control over management in large part because of social cohesion among the “inner circle” of corporate elites, those individuals, including manager-directors, who serve in leadership positions at multiple large firms (Mills, 1956; Useem, 1984; Ratcliffe, 1987; Burris, 2001; Domhoff, 2002).”
- Stealthy Footsteps to the Boardroom: Executives' Backgrounds, Sophisticated Interpersonal Influence Behavior, and Board Appointments (2010, background): “…indicators of upper-class status (Broad, 1996; for reviews, see Baltzell, 1958; Domhoff, 2002), and a long line of quantitative, empirical studies has used these characteristics to indicate such status (e.g., Useem and Karabel, 1986; Ratcliff, 1987; Burris, 1991, 2001; Palmer and Barber, 2001).”