to cancel the special tax district of Walt Disney World in the state — a decision with billion-dollar implications for the company and the communities that surround the theme park — after the company publicly clashed with DeSantis over a Florida law limitingThe researchers defined partisanship as “the degree to which political views within the same executive team are dominated by a single party.
Part of the divide is geographic, researchers noted, with executives in Texas and Ohio becoming more Republican, and executives in California and New York becoming more Democratic.from the Pew Research Center found that Democrats and Republicans are “farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years.” But the spike in political polarization among executives was more than double that of local registered voters in the same period, the study’s authors observed.
“Consumers have increasing expectations for companies to take a side,” Tsoutsoura said. “This could be because with the growing political partisanship, the political ideology of people seems to play a bigger role on how they think about their identity.
It can also weigh on corporate performances. The researchers found that executives in the political minority were more likely to leave, and that “departures of executives who are misaligned with the political views of the team’s majority are more costly for shareholders than departures of politically aligned executives.”