Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. HOMEPAGE

Here are the political leanings of executives and employees at the biggest US companies

Crowdpac, a company working toward more transparency and widespread participation in campaign finance, used decades of campaign finance reports from the Federal Election Commission to find out how liberal or conservative various donors and candidates are.

Advertisement

Crowdpac has a scoring system that evaluates where politicians and campaign donors fall on the left-right spectrum based on who is donating to whom and officials' voting records. Liberal donors will donate to liberal candidates; conservatives running for office will seek out conservative donors. By tracking the relationships between donors and candidates, Crowdpac was able to assign an ideology score to candidates and donors alike.

Since the FEC's records include donors' employers and job titles, Crowdpac was able to find average ideology scores for executives and non-executive employees who donated to a candidate in at least one election between 2004 and 2014 for each of the Fortune 100 companies. The scores range from -10, representing very liberal donors, to 10, representing very conservative donors.

Here are the companies with the most conservative executives. Several oil companies show up on the list:

most conservative executives
Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Crowdpac

And here are the companies with the most conservative employees. There's a decent amount of overlap with the above group:

Advertisement
most conservative employees
Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Crowdpac

On the other side of the political spectrum, here are the companies with the most liberal executive donors. Several tech giants like Google, Apple, Cisco, and Amazon show up on the list:

most liberal executives
Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Crowdpac

Here are the companies with the most liberal employees. As with the more conservative companies, there's a lot of overlap between executives and employees:

most liberal employees
Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Crowdpac

While most companies show a decent amount of political similarity between executives and non-executives, there are exceptions. Here are the companies with the biggest gaps between executives (in red) and non-executives (in blue). In each of these companies, the non-executives were more liberal than the executives:

biggest gap
Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Crowdpac

For more, check out Crowdpac's website here.

Advertisement
Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification.

Jump to

  1. Main content
  2. Search
  3. Account