Research in global supply chain

How does the political composition of firms’ workforces shape the stability of supply-chain relationships when disruptions occur? We examine 151,410 relationship-year observations covering 39,349 buyer–supplier dyads among U.S. publicly traded firms from 2013 to 2023. We combine FactSet Revere relationship histories, voter-registration-based workforce political measures, and county-level weather-related FEMA disaster declarations. Exploiting staggered supplier exposure, dyad and year fixed effects, supplier state-by-year and industry-by-year fixed effects, and heterogeneity-robust event-study estimators, we estimate within-relationship changes in dissolution following disruption. Supplier disaster exposure is associated with a 7.1-percentage-point increase in relationship dissolution—approximately 40 percent of the sample mean—and with a smaller but significant increase in permanent termination. This response varies systematically with pre-disruption workforce politics. Dyadic political alignment is suggestively associated with a weaker dissolution response, whereas buyers with more politically like-minded supplier portfolios and workforces characterized by greater partisan extremity exhibit stronger responses. The buyer-extremity pattern is the most robust across specifications. These findings connect research on supply-chain resilience with organizational politics by showing that political composition is not merely an internal organizational attribute but also a boundary condition for the stability of interfirm ties under external shocks. More broadly, the results reveal how firms’ political composition and supply-base structure shape the reconfiguration of relational networks following disruption.