Election decisions made by board members affect their success

According to the author, the base ratio between conservative and Democratic voters in executive positions rose from 63:37 to 75:25 between 2008 and 2016, declining slightly after Trump’s election. The study’s authors determined the degree of party agreement within the board of directors by the probability that two randomly selected individuals from the same group would have the same attitude. That probability increased by nearly 8 percentage points between 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, and 2020, when Joe Biden defeated Obama’s successor, Trump. After Trump was elected in 2016, scientists noticed a particularly clear boost. Currently its value is 65 percent. In about two-thirds of cases, a random drawing of two board members from the same company results in a political agreement.

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Kempf also dealt with the geographic division of the country, which looks roughly like this: States on the East and West coasts are dominated by Democrats, while Republicans dominate the interior of the United States. However, this does not explain the growing polarization among managers. Compared to their respective local populations, polarization among company leaders increased twice as fast during the period under study.