Why Do Firms Engage in Social Activism? Consumers, Employees, and Liberal CEOs

Maks-Solomon, Cory. 2019. “Why Do Firms Engage in Social Activism? Consumers, Employees, and Liberal CEOs.” (Job market paper)

Last updated October 10, 2019.

Corporate political activity on social issues is becoming more common each year. Liberal activism increased by 50% from 2008 to 2017. Conservative activism was confined to the earlier part of the time series.

Why Do Corporations Engage in LGBT Rights Activism?

Maks-Solomon, Cory, and Josiah Mark Drewry. “Why Do Corporations Engage in LGBT Rights Activism?” Business and Politics. Accepted with minor revisions, September 16, 2019.

  • 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.
  • Most recent draft of the paper is available here. And the appendix is available here.
Companies with an LGBT employee resource group (ERG) are more likely to engage in corporate activism in support of LGBT rights, ceteris paribus. Yet this relationship is strongly conditional upon employee skill-level: LGBT employee groups only predict activism for companies in industries with highly-educated employees. In order for ERGs to be effective at convincing their employers to engage in activism, they must have bargaining power.

Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor? Partisanship, Class, and Representation in the U.S. Senate

Maks-Solomon, Cory, and Elizabeth Rigby. “Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor? Partisanship, Class, and Representation in the U.S. Senate.” Political Research Quarterly. Published ahead of print, July 13, 2019. 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.
  • 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: Social Policy and the Great Recession

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: Responsiveness to States, Voters, and Special Interests

OregonPlan

Maks-Solomon, Cory. 2018. “Direct Election and Economic Policy Voting in the U.S. Senate.” In Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.

  • Roll call votes codebook available here.
  • Replication data and Stata do-file available here.
  • The featured image 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)