Some of America’s largest companies make their most important business decisions based on political ideology rather than profit, according to a Rutgers study.
“People often assume that companies are only motivated by money or trying to generate the biggest returns for shareholders,” said Andrey Tomashevskiy, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers–New Brunswick and coauthor of the study published in the journal Economics and Politics. “Our research suggests political ideology plays a key role in the public positions corporations take, even if those decisions aren’t always economically sound.”
Researchers have long known that companies’ political activities are driven by pragmatic and ideological factors. Corporations act pragmatically – an energy giant supporting carbon credits, for instance – to maximize profit and contribute to positive public perception. Alternatively, companies take partisan political or social stances for ideological reasons. What scholars haven’t been good at is quantifying firms’ public political stances.
To help close this gap, Tomashevskiy and Volkan Tibet Gur, a graduate student in the Department of Political Science and coauthor of the study, analyzed publicly available corporate social responsibility (CSR) statements for 601 Fortune 1000 firms. Using computer models and language algorithms, they identified topics in the reports reflecting stances on environmental and social issues and calculated the percentage of the documents devoted to either topic. To read the full story.