The literature on corporate political influence has primarily focused on expenditures made by corporations and their PACs but has largely ignored the political activities of the individuals who lead these firms. To better understand the role of corporate elites in political advocacy, I introduce a new database of campaign contributions made by corporate directors and executives of Fortune 500 firms. Donating to political campaigns is nearly universal among corporate elites. When compared to corporate PACs, corporate elites are more ideological, more willing to support non-incumbents, and less likely to target powerful legislators. The results also reveal substantial heterogeneity in the political preferences of directors both across and within firms. In addition to challenging widely held beliefs about the political leanings of corporate elites, the prevalence of bipartisan boardrooms has important implications for how the preferences of key decision-makers within a firm shape its political activities.

A business enterprise interested in influencing the design, adoption or enforcement of a particular law, rule or regulation often confronts a choice. Does it lobby officials directly? Or does it do so indirectly, using a collective action group as an intermediary? We draw on data from a large, 2010 survey of enterprises across the Russian Federation to demonstrate that the propensity to engage in intermediated lobbying increases with region-level political competition. Our explanation builds on recent evidence confirming Mancur Olson's claim (1982) that less encompassing actors tend to lobby for more distortionary policies. We hypothesize that with greater political competition government officials become more responsive to encompassing voices (i.e. associations of businesses as opposed to single firms), since the electoral costs of being captured by narrower interests becomes greater. Evidence from a complementary survey of regional business association managers points in the same direction; the relative attention paid by officials to lobbying efforts by encompassing associations increases with political competition.

Why do some countries indulge in urban bias, potentially harming economic development in the process, while others promote a vibrant agricultural sector? Two main explanations have been put forth. On the one hand, market failures, due to information asymmetries, mean that farmers who dearly require credit to succeed are shut out of lending markets, even if lenders could potentially benefit from making loans more readily available. On the other hand, political failures, due to state capture, mean that farmers will be subject to implicit taxes as a way of generating rents for politically powerful, industrial interests in the city. This paper builds on the latter view and corroborates [Bates, Robert. 1981. Markets and States in Tropical Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.] insight that the state might have its own fiscal reasons for indulging in urban bias since both infant industries in the manufacturing sector and monopsony endowing marketing boards in the agricultural sector potentially provide easy-to-collect revenues. I adduce cross-national empirical support for the fiscal roots view that is robust across measures of state capacity and instrumental variables. A case study of Mexico also provides supporting evidence.

The complicated and multi-layered policymaking process in the European Union presents private interests, such as business firms, with an interesting strategic choice of whom and how to lobby. As the costs of lobbying at the domestic level increase, firms are expected to, instead, devote their resources to lobbying at the European level. Specifically, this article examines how domestic access points and domestic partisanship affect the costs and benefits of lobbying at the domestic versus European level. Using data on firm-level decisions to lobby the EU, this research finds that in countries where is it more costly (or less beneficial) to lobby domestically, firms are more likely to lobby at the EU level.