Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in the Political Donations of America’s Corporate Elite

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the framework of the EUI Analytical Sociology Colloquia, this session features a presentation by Jennifer Heerwig and Josh Zhang (Stony Brook University, New York).

Political and economic sociologists have long debated the political strategies of corporate elites. Although women and racial minorities have made slow but steady inroads into senior managerial and director positions over the past half-century, there is little research on gender and racial disparities in the political behavior of corporate elites, despite the fact that race and gender are key social cleavages in American politics.

In this study, we investigate whether gender, race and their intersection shape the political donation strategies of elite actors or whether class-wide forces compel these elites to exercise homogeneous contribution strategies. Relying on a novel longitudinal corporate elites political donation database, we provide the first systematic elite-level analysis of political donations to U.S. Congressional campaigns during the 1980-2014 election cycles.

Overall, we find that, compared to men, women elites are less likely to donate or split their donations to both political parties, but are more ideologically extreme. We also find significant evidence of intersectionality between gender and race in political donations among corporate elites. The gender gap is less salient for political participation but more pronounced for donation strategies among elites of color. Women of color are more likely to donate money to congressional campaigns compared to minority men and white women. Women of color are also less likely to be bipartisan and more ideologically extreme. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for research on corporate political behaviour.