Contributions as Usual: The Long-Term Corporate Response to Election Deniers After the January 6th Capitol Insurrection

How did large corporations respond to the January 6th Capitol Insurrection? Through an examination of campaign contributions from Fortune 500 companies’ political action committees (PACs) to members of Congress (MCs), I ask whether businesses penalized House Republicans who objected to the 2020 Electoral College results, and whether those penalties were sustained across multiple electoral cycles. I suggest that corporate responsiveness can be explained via the trade-offs between public reputation and government access. Through a Difference-in-Differences (DID) event study, I find evidence of a sharp but declining penalty for Republican election deniers. While corporations that pledged to cut off their contributions did so to the greatest degree, I likewise find evidence of this behavior among corporations that did not make public statements. These results extend to other kinds of PACs, such as those for smaller corporations and trade groups. Using a triple-difference (DDD) design, I additionally demonstrate that more visible corporations were more likely to keep their distance from election deniers, while larger government contractors were less likely to do so. These findings emphasize the role of reputation and government reliance in the corporate response to controversial politicians.