Rewarding the Opposition: Big Tech’s Workforce Money, Partisan Cross-Pressures, and Senate Support for Platform Regulation

Corporate campaign money is usually studied as money that firms control. For the largest technology firms, most of it is not. We examine “Big Five” platform-firm contributions and U.S. senators’ support for platform antitrust legislation across the 117th and 118th Congresses, as that legislation advanced and collapsed. Separating corporate PAC money from the giving of the firms’ employees and executives, and reconstructing the giving of 22,441 employee donors to every federal recipient, we find that Big Tech money is negatively associated with support for regulation, most steeply among conservative senators. Eighty-one percent comes from employees, mostly one-party Democratic donors giving out of state. The association is carried by executives and cross-party donors, as a firm-level account predicts. Yet money of every kind, including sincere partisan giving, moved away from senators who had supported regulation. We call this the workforce as constituency: business power that requires no coordination by the firm.