Wednesday, January 12, 2022

More and more, executives at major corporations belong to the same politcal party and tend to leave their companies if they are in the minority party there

See The political polarization of U.S. firms by Tyler Cowen. 

"Executive teams in U.S. firms are becoming increasingly partisan, leading to a political polarization of corporate America. We establish this new fact using political affiliations from voter registration records for top executives of S&P 1500 firms between 2008 and 2018. The rise in partisanship is explained by both an increasing share of Republican executives and increased sorting by partisan executives into firms with like-minded individuals. Further, we find that within a given firm-year, executives whose political views do not match those of the team’s majority have a higher probability of leaving the firm. The increase in partisanship is taking place despite executive teams becoming more diverse in terms of gender and race.

That is from a new paper by Vyacheslav Fos, Elisabeth Kempf, and Margarita Tsoutsoura."

Related posts: 

Are some blue jeans really Democratic and others Republican? (2019)

People say the president can control gas prices if the president belongs to the other party (2017)

Why Are Americans So Distrustful of Each Other? (2021)

Excerpt from this last one:

"Recent American history bears out that idea. The beginning of our current political polarization is often dated to 1968, when the Republican Party became nationally competitive through Southern realignment. In that year, according to the American National Election Survey, 56% of Americans believed most people can be trusted; in 2018, after a half-century of increasing partisan division, only 31.5% did.

Growing up under polarized political institutions may lead young people to generalize from partisan distrust to social distrust. Americans are sorting themselves into social silos, seldom interacting with unlike-minded others, leading to less moderation and more radicalization. This may be due in part to social media, though recent research on the effect of social media has reached mixed conclusions on this question. But the effect is clear: In 2017, around 70% of Democrats said that Donald Trump voters couldn't be trusted, and around 70% of Republicans said the same of Hillary Clinton voters."

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