Mixing Motives: Political Donations by Corporate Executives

Abstract

What motivates corporate executives to make political donations? Scholars interested in political ideology generally assign expressive motivations to executive donations while CPA scholars view executives as largely strategic donors. This study reconciles these two contrasting perspectives by reconceptualizing executives as mixed motive donors who allocate their donations both strategically and expressively. To support this position, we construct the most comprehensive dataset to date on executive donations from 1980 to 2024 and develop a measure of mixed motive donations that reflects both expressive and strategic giving. Using non-executive donors as a counterfactual baseline of expressive donors, we provide evidence that bipartisan donations and donations to politically influential members of Congress are examples of strategic giving. We find that executives devote a larger share of their donations to strategic giving, driven by their role as executives. This supports the argument, rooted in resource dependence theory, that executives face professional incentives to donate strategically. However, we also find evidence that a non-trivial portion of executives’ donations are expressive, and that strategic giving varies across individuals and time. We find that variance in mixed motive giving can be explained partly by executives' compensation elasticity, firm size, political risk exposure and whether or not an executive is the CEO of their company. Overall, our analysis reveals that scholars should refrain from making uniform assumptions about executives’ motivations to donate, and view them as a varied group of mixed motive donors.