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.

中文翻译：

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将政治纳入企业政治活动：跨政治背景下企业与政府互动的方差分解分析


尽管关于企业与政府之间关系的理论丰富，但对企业政治活动（CPA）的研究尚未全面考虑政治背景（例如政党意识形态以及政党政府控制的统一或分裂程度）如何改变企业政治活动的显着性。 CPA 如何在行业、公司和高管层面因素中实现，这可以揭示似乎更重要（或不那么重要）的影响程度。为了加深我们的理解，我们对美国上市公司（2001-2019）进行了方差分解分析，探讨了每个级别对公司（游说支出和竞选捐款）和政府行为（政府合同）的相对影响，并解析了基于样本的样本。关键政府部门是由民主党还是共和党控制。我们通常发现，公司效应对方差的解释最多，其次是行业，而高管效应则解释最少。然而，当考虑到我们样本期间的政治背景时，这种模式发生了显着变化。因此，我们的研究结果对未来的注册会计师研究和理论化具有重要意义。