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JULY 5, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
Woke Corporations? That Ain't What the Numbers Show.
New survey finds growing numbers of Republicans in executive suites.
With each passing day, more and more Republicans, it seems, are grousing
about corporations. Those damned CEOs are concerned about racial and
gender equity, or abortion rights or climate change or science or some
other woke falsification.
In fact, however, the share of corporate pooh-bahs who fret about
microaggressions has been growing more micro. A study
published last month by the
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) tracked the partisan voter
registrations of CEOs and other top executives at the S&P 1500 over the
past decade and a half and found that the percentage of Republicans had
risen from 63 percent in 2008 to 68 percent in 2020. Notwithstanding the
presidency of Donald Trump, that is, the share of top executives who
identified themselves as Republicans rose to more than two-thirds in
those years.
The paper-by Vyacheslav Fos of Boston College, and Elisabeth Kempf and
Margarita Tsoutsoura of the business schools of, respectively, the
University of Chicago and Cornell University-also found that both
Democratic and Republican executives directed some of their campaign
contributions to candidates of the other party, in the time-honored
tradition of currying favor with whoever's in power. (That's my own
causal analysis, not that of the paper's authors.) More interestingly,
it found that the partisan composition of corporate leadership teams had
become significantly more uniform since 2008: Firms with Republican
leaders contained fewer and fewer Democrats in the leadership team over
the course of those years, while firms with Democratic leaders contained
correspondingly fewer Republicans. The growing partisan tilt of C-suite
teams also reflected the partisan tilt of the broader electorate in
their region: more Republican in Texas, more Democratic in California.
In one sense, this is nothing new: Major shareholders and executives
have flocked to (and often owned outright) the Republican Party since
private corporations first arose in the aftermath of the Civil War.
There have always been variations, of course: Earlier NBER papers have
documented how Wall Street support for Democrats began increasing in the
1990s, attracted by the party's pro-Wall Street agenda during the
Clinton presidency and repelled by the Republicans' troglodytery on
social and cultural issues.
What's beyond the scope of this new NBER paper is any investigation of
the ideologies that inform CEOs' partisan affiliations. It's clear,
however, that while Democratic executives may be committed to, say,
greater gender equity and some mitigation of the climate crisis, the
percentage who actually want to share even a little intra-corporate
power with their employees likely hovers around the 1 percent mark.
Exceptions to this rule are rare enough to merit coverage. As I noted
last month, Microsoft President Brad Smith recently declared that the
company wouldn't oppose its workers' efforts to unionize, sensing,
perhaps, that this departure from the corporate norm might actually help
recruit and retain young techies. A handful of major
investors-Seattle's Nick Hanauer and, judging by this interview
posted today at
**Prospect**publishing partner Capital & Main, Silicon Valley's Roy
Bahat-are clearly pro-union. For now, though, such figures remain
unicorns even in all-Democratic executive suites.
So is wokery running amok in America's corporate boardrooms? Clearly,
not in at least two-thirds of them. And in almost all of the remaining
one-third, being pro-woke doesn't yet mean being pro-worker.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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In addition to the obliteration of privacy and criminalization of
women's health, it's a waste of money. BY TOBY JAFFE
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