Presidential candidates have devoted a surprising amount of attention to the influence of large corporate donors and super PACs in the current election cycle. The general concern is that corporate campaign financing leaves politicians bound to elite interests. Although the association between corporate donations and legislative behavior is intuitive and theoretically appealing, empirical support for this link is mixed. I examine the effects of corporate financing on the proposal and passage of state-level labor legislation. I employ a unique combination of data on (a) all proposed state-level collective bargaining bills that were proposed in 2012, (b) financial contributions to all state legislatorsâ most recent campaigns, (c) the institutional structure of each state legislative chamber, and (d) state constituent characteristics. Results obtained from ordinary least squares and negative binomial regressions indicate that legislators are more likely to propose and pass anti-labor laws in states with greater corporate elite campaign financing. Counterfactual mediation analyses show that the association between corporate contributions and the passage of anti-labor law is fully mediated by the number of anti-labor bill proposals. Moderation analyses demonstrate that the effect of corporate donations on anti-labor law is more pronounced in labor-friendly states. Elite class dominance theory is supported by the principal finding that corporations strategically manipulate state political institutions to undermine labor.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-03032017-085934 |
| Date | 15 March 2017 |
| Creators | Jacobs, Anna Weller |
| Contributors | Larry W. Isaac, Daniel B. Cornfield, Joshua Murray, G. William Domhoff |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03032017-085934/ |
| Rights | restrictone, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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