Working papers
Working papers
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Kagan, Max*, Justin Frake*, and Reuben Hurst*. "VRScores: A Voter Registration-Based Approach for Measuring Workforce Politics." Minor revision at Organization Science.
Project website: https://vrscores.org/
A growing literature explores how workers’ personal politics shape organizational outcomes. Prior research has typically measured employees’ political leanings using data on political donations. In this paper, we introduce VRscores, an alternative measure constructed by linking U.S. voter registrations to online worker profiles covering 2012 to 2022. Across jobs active during 2021-2022, VRscores capture the political affiliations of 21.8 million workers across 2.6 million employers—substantially more than the 1.2 million donors at 610,000 companies identified through donation-based methods over a similar period. We also show that VRscores are more representative of employees in terms of partisanship, seniority, and industry. Furthermore, we show that VRscores and donation-based measures are only moderately correlated (𝑟 = 0.47) and differ in their classification of the political lean of a given workplace for one in four companies. To facilitate future research, we are also releasing a public dataset of VRscores for more than 365,000 organizations, including unique organizational identifiers. We describe various applications of VRscores for scholars in strategy and management as well as social scientists more broadly.
Kagan, Max*, Justin Frake*, and Reuben Hurst*. "Partisan Segregation in the U.S. Workplace." Revise and resubmit at Nature Human Behavior.
Media coverage: Niskanen Center, UC Berkeley
2025 Dorothy Day Award for Outstanding Labor Research (American Political Science Association)
Political segregation in the United States is increasing across geographic and social domains. Using a novel dataset created by matching employment histories with voter registration data for 14.5 million workers, we provide the first large-scale estimate of workplace political segregation in the United States. We present four main findings. First, partisans are strongly segregated by workplace. This segregation is approximately twice as large as prior estimates of residential political segregation, and comparable in magnitude to racial and gender segregation in the workplace. Second, segregation is largest among those who are politically active and likely have more market power. Third, political segregation has been rising since 2017, especially among new hires. Fourth, because Democrats comprise a greater share of workers, workplace segregation means that Republicans experience a significantly larger share of Democrats at work than vice versa.
Can employees help firms complete in the nonmarket arena? Research on nonmarket strategy has recognized constituency building as a form of corporate political activity (CPA), but there has been limited investigation into whether and how firms can rely upon employees to support their political goals. While employees would seem a promising target for constituency building, research suggests that employees often react negatively when firms communicate political messages, making it unclear if firms can or should rely upon employees to support CPA. I develop and test a theory that firms can rely on employees' political support when two conditions are met: first, that the policy issue is non-partisan, and second, that there are clear strategic implications for the firm and its employees. To test this theory, I look at an important but understudied political context: direct democracy via non-partisan ballot questions at the U.S. state and local level. Using an unprecedented dataset which links millions of U.S. workers with their election turnout records, I employ difference-indifferences and find that employees and members of their households turn out to vote at significantly higher rates versus unaffected voters in low-turnout elections featuring ballot questions with strategic implications for their employer (up to 33 p.p. for employees and up to 13 p.p. for household members). These findings present novel theoretical insights and empirical evidence about how firms can influence policy outcomes and speak to broader questions about firms' impact on society.
Kagan, Max and Vanessa Burbano. "Beyond Left and Right: New Evidnece on Consumer Reactions to Corporate Sociopolitical Stance-Taking."
AOM Annual Meeting Best Paper Designation (2025)
A growing body of research shows that corporate sociopolitical stance-taking can lead to polarized reactions from stakeholders. Thus far, research has focused on issues characterized by ideological (or partisan) divides. While these studies have emphasized the role of ideology in driving polarized stakeholder reactions, there is little evidence of whether similar patterns of polarization can emerge on issues which feature less clear ideological (or partisan) divides. We address this gap by studying consumer reactions to real-world corporate responses to a set of issues which include the Israel-Palestine conflict. While Israel-Palestine is a highly charged issue that divides Americans, divisions do not fall along clearly partisan or ideological lines. Using an incentive-compatible survey experiment, we find that consumers consistently react negatively to stances they oppose regardless of whether the issues are aligned with ideological divisions (e.g., stances on Black Lives Matter, LGBT rights, and climate change) or issues are less directly aligned with a ideology or partisan camp (e.g., stances on Israel-Palestine). Consistent with prior work, we show that consumers penalize companies for taking misaligned stances, but do not reward them for taking aligned ones. We also demonstrate that these changes are almost entirely manifested as decreases along the extensive margin (i.e., boycotting) rather than along the intensive margin (i.e., continued consumption but reduced willingness-to-pay). Our findings suggest that polarized stakeholder reactions can occur across a range of issue areas and need not be solely attributable to ideological divides.
Hurst, Reuben*, Max Kagan*, Matthew Lee*, and Justin Frake*. "Workplaces as Engines of Democratic Participation."
Organizational cultures shape not only workplace outcomes but also civic life. We introduce and evaluate the concept of organizational civic culture---the norms within organizations of participation in democratic institutions beyond the workplace. We theorize two pathways through which civic culture operates: (1) an interactional pathway, where peer behaviors drive civic norms, and (2) a symbolic pathway, where managers model civic participation. Leveraging a novel dataset containing employment histories and voter turnout records for 28 million Americans, along with a quasi-experimental mover design, we find strong causal evidence that peer civic engagement increases individual turnout. In contrast, we find limited evidence for top-down effects from managers. The influence of organizational civic culture is especially pronounced in low-turnout elections, among college graduates, younger employees, and those without an established track record of voting, and when a greater proportion of coworkers share the employee's partisan affiliation. These findings identify employer organizations as a previously overlooked but important scaffold to democratic institutions.
White, James, Reuben Hurst, and Max Kagan. "Corporate Political Stances and Employee Turnover."
SMS Annual Conference Best Paper (nominated) (2025)
SMS Strategic Human Capital Interest Group Best Paper Prize (nominated) (2025)
We provide the first study investigating the relationship between corporate political stances and employee turnover. While prior studies suggest asymmetrically negative reactions from stakeholders misaligned with corporate stances, they have tended to examine behaviors that incur little cost to stakeholders. We argue that when it comes to turnover, where expressing opposition to a stance by leaving one’s job is exceptionally costly, the positive (retention) effects of stance taking will instead tend to outweigh negative (attrition) effects. We evaluate this argument in the context of individual employee responses to North Carolina’s 2016 HB2 “bathroom bill” using a novel, large-scale employer-employee matched dataset that captures workers’ personal politics. Companies which publicly opposed the bill benefited from increased job tenure (reduced turnover) among employees who likely agreed with the stance, with no overall offsetting negative response from employees who likely disagreed with the stance. Consistent with our theory, attrition effects were concentrated among a small number of workers for whom exit was plausibly low cost and/or who strongly opposed their employer’s response.
Other peer-reviewed research
Other peer-reviewed research
Brutger, Ryan*, Stephen Chaudoin*, and Max Kagan*. 2023. "Trade Wars and Election Interference." Review of International Organizations, 18:1-25.
In response to the Trump trade war, China, the EU, and other countries enacted politically-targeted trade retaliation (PTTR) against swing states and Republican strongholds in the United States. We argue that PTTR increases public concerns about foreign election interference and assess the effects of such retaliation across partisan affiliations. We test our predictions using a national survey experiment in the United States fielded before the 2020 election. In contrast to findings about sanctions and foreign endorsements, we find strong evidence that PTTR increases fears of election interference among both Republicans and Democrats. Partisan double standards in reaction to PTTR were strongest for retaliation targeting swing states and smaller for retaliation targeting the President’s base. Overall, the evidence shows that economic policies which are not primarily intended to influence elections may nevertheless come to be viewed by the public as foreign election interference.
* denotes equal co-authorship
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