o Joshua Mausolf - Enter the Partisan Firm
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ENTER THE PARTISAN FIRM

Across the American republic, pundits, politicians, and social scientists alike have studied and speculated about the rising tide of partisan divisiveness threatening to inundate the political mooring of American society. Yet, to what extent, does partisan polarization (also known as affective polarization) affect behavior in firms?

Are firms becoming more partisan? Does partisanship affect hiring or corporate boards? How does one's identity as a Democrat or Republican shape the likelihood of receiving a callback for a job? I answer these questions in a three study evaluation of partisanship in corporations. Enter the Partisan Firm.

METHODS

The primary data sources for these projects are outlined below. For each of these data sources, I developed complex data engineering and ETL pipelines, primarily using SQL and Python, with some R, to obtain and preprocess the data. Github repositories with reproducible code for each of these projects are linked below, with full details in the published deliverables.

Firm Partisanship Data - Federal Election Commission (FEC): Public government database outlining individual campaign contributions, including individual names, occupations, and firms, as well as the contribution partisanship via a recursive algorithm I designed. The algorithm infers the partisanship of over 54M individual contributions by iterating through committee and candidate party affiliations as well as the itemized contributions between committees from 1980-2018. Analysis performed using dynamic time warping hierarchical cluster analysis and longitudinal visualizations.

Job Applicant Callback Data: A digital field experiment sending matched pairs of resumes and cover letters to employers combined with partisan data on firms. I designed custom Python code to identify current job openings at over 4,000 possible firms, generate a matched pair experimental design, and dynamically create and email nearly 4,000 customized cover letters and resumes per the experimental design to firm contacts. Analysis performed using bivariate statistics and logistic regression models.

Firm Board Membership Data: ISS Risk Metrics Board Composition Data, DIME AOI Data, and Firm Partisanship Data from the FEC. This project involved substantial data cleaning and manipulation in Python to deduplicate board members, fuzzy match board members to individual contributions, and determine the longitudinal corporate board membership change events for multiple lag periods, 2007-2018. Analysis was performed using cross-classified random effects logistic regression models, a type of longitudinal multi-level modeling using both fixed and random effects.

Results

Across these projects we see partisan polarization in firms such that employees at Democratic and Republican firms (across executives, managers, and other levels) are increasingly similar to their colleagues in their partisan expression. Partisanship, in-turn, impacts firm behavior including hiring behavior and corporate board membership. Applicants were more likely to receive callbacks when they matched firm partisanship. Opposing partisans were less likely to be hired. This pattern also holds for corporate board member replacements. Some highlights from the projects are below:

Corporate Politics: The Emergence of Partisan Polarization in Firms, 1980-2018 - This paper reveals the emergence of three types of firm clusters: polarized Republican, polarized Democrat, and Amphibious firms. We see increasing partisan homogeneity at these Democratic and Republican firms: We see not only increased partisan similarity within levels, there is also increasing similarity of partisanship between levels. That is, employees - whether executives, managers, or lower level occupations were more likely to belong to the same political party.





Office Politics: How Affective Polarization and Partisan Homophily Alter Hiring Decisions - In this paper, we see how partisanship affects hiring behavior in firms. Across a variety of firm industry's and job types, professional job applicants were more likely to receive callbacks when their partisanship matched the firm. Opposing partisans were less likely to receive a callback.





Party in the Boardroom: The Role of Affective Polarization in Corporate Board Appointments - A similar phenomenon persists in corporate board membership appointments. Whether the appointment was a board member exchange or simply a new board member, they were more likely to align with the prevailing partisanship of the board. Republican boards appointed fellow Republicans, Democratic boards appointed other Democrats.



Collectively, these results substantiate the idea that partisanship reshapes firms' internal organizational structure, affecting not only the partisan balance of a firm, but also redefining exactly who is welcome to join a given firm, proceed therein, and rise through the ranks as a valued employee.


Deliverables

This research was conducted by Joshua Gary Mausolf as part of his doctoral studies in the Department of Sociology at The University of Chicago. The research is published in ProQuest as his dissertation Enter the Partisan Firm and has been previously presented at a number of conferences, including the International Conference for Computational Social Science and Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association Links to the dissertation, project excerpts, several presentations, and code are found below.

Dissertation - Enter the Partisan Firm
Mausolf, Joshua Gary. 2020. “Enter the Partisan Firm.” ProQuest.
Paper - Corporate Politics
Mausolf, Joshua Gary. 2020. “Corporate Politics: The Emergence of Partisan Polarization in Firms, 1980-2018.” ProQuest.
Paper - Office Politics
Mausolf, Joshua Gary. 2020. “Office Politics: How Affective Polarization and Partisan Homophily Alter Hiring Decisions.” ProQuest.
Paper - Party in the Boardroom
Mausolf, Joshua Gary. 2020. “Party in the Boardroom: The Role of Affective Polarization in Corporate Board Appointments.” ProQuest.

Presentation - Enter the Partisan Firm

Code - OpenFEC
Code - Office Politics
Code - Party in the Boardroom


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Joshua Gary Mausolf