“Liberal Elite” CEOs and Corporate Social Activism

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Maks-Solomon, Cory. 2020. “‘Liberal Elite’ CEOs and Corporate Social Activism.” Working paper.

  • Online appendices available here.
  • Previous draft of the paper, which served as my job market paper is available here, and its appendix is available here.
Corporate social activism–firms taking liberal policy stances on some of the most controversial issues of the day–has been increasing steadily since 2008.

Why Do Corporations Engage in LGBT Rights Activism?

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Maks-Solomon, Cory, and Josiah Mark Drewry. “Why Do Corporations Engage in LGBT Rights Activism? LGBT Employee Groups as Internal Pressure Groups.” Business and Politics. Published online ahead of print, September 2, 2020. http://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2020.5.

  • This research was presented at the 2018 APSA annual conference, the winter 2019 NCAPSA workshop, and the 2019 AOM annual conference.
  • In the Social Issues in Management section of the 2019 Academy of Management Annual Meeting, this paper received the Best Student Paper Award.
  • Pre-publication draft of the paper is available here. And the appendix is available here.
  • Replication files (zipped) are available here.
Companies with LGBT employee resource groups (ERG) are more likely to engage in LGBT rights activism. However, this relationship is conditional upon employee education: only in highly-educated workforces are LGBT employees willing and able to use their ERGs to convince managers to engage in activism.

Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor?

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Maks-Solomon, Cory, and Elizabeth Rigby. 2020. “Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor? Partisanship, Class, and Representation in the U.S. Senate.” Political Research Quarterly 73 (4): 848–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919862623.

  • Pre-publication draft can be found here. (And the Online Appendix is available here.)
  • Replication materials are available through Google Drive.
  • This research received media coverage at Vox and Jacobin.
  • This research was previously presented at APSA 2017 and SPSA 2018.
Rich and poor Republicans are more in agreement on social issues than they are on economic issues; meanwhile, rich and poor Democrats are in absolute agreement on economic issues but rich Democrats are more liberal than poor Democrats on social issues.

For each quintile (1 = poor; 5 = rich), the average ideology is plotted with a normally-distributed confidence interval surrounding it. The x-axis represents the percentage of issues that the respondent took a conservative stance, ranging from 0% to 80% of the issues.

Weathering the Storm

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Maks‐Solomon, Cory, and Robert P. Stoker. 2019. “Weathering the Storm: Social Policy and the Great Recession.” Policy Studies Journal 47 (S1): S119–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12318.

This review discusses recent challenges to the welfare state arising from the Great Recession (GR). The GR was a significant event for social policy analysts, as it tested the responsiveness of welfare systems in the midst of a recent trend toward austerity politics in advanced economies. Social policy changes were part of the toolkit advanced democracies used to respond to the GR, and the welfare state mitigated the consequences of the GR. However, a stark limitation of the social safety net in the United States was the failure to assist immigrant households. The nexus of immigration and social policy is likely to be a significant controversy as we consider the meaning of social citizenship.

Direct Election and Economic Policy Voting in the U.S. Senate

corymaks

Maks-Solomon, Cory. 2018. “Direct Election and Economic Policy Voting in the U.S. Senate: Responsiveness to States, Voters, and Special Internets.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.

  • Roll call votes codebook available here.
  • Replication data and Stata do-file available here.
OregonPlan
Map shows all Oregon Plan states that adopted a form of de facto direct election before the implementation of the 17th Amendment. (Source: Kenny and Rush 1990)