The Two Faces of Capital: Corporations and Individual Capitalists as Political Actors

Widespread access to public records of campaign contributions by corporate political action committees (PACs) have made these the preferred data for analyzing political partisanship within the capitalist class. By comparison, data on political contributions by individual capitalists were, until recently, difficult to obtain and rarely subjected to systematic study. Important differences are demonstrated between these two forms of capitalist political action by directly comparing the campaign contributions of 592 individual capitalists with the contributions of the 394 major corporations with which those capitalists were associated. Campaign contributions by individual capitalists follow a logic different from that of corporate PACs. Corporations are generally more interested in buying influence with incumbents, while individual capitalists are more concerned with bolstering the election prospects of favored candidates. By providing a more direct measure of capitalists’ political preferences, the analysis of campaign contributions by individual capitalists clarifies theoretical questions that remain unresolved in the research based on corporate PACs. Variables that elude measurement when corporations are the units of analysis (e.g., ethnicity) are shown to have important consequences for capitalist political partisanship.