The legislative deliberations of Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative also supported elite theories of the state and showed that corporate campaign contributions and the reciprocal relationships between corporate elites and the federal government also influence American counternarcotic aid flows. This chapter uses the Heckman selection estimator to ascertain whether these outcomes are also generalizable. First, it uses principal component factor analysis to create an index to operationalize C. Wright Mills’ concept of an interlocking directorate, which measures the interconnections among corporate board of directors for the corporations in the data set and their interconnections with policy think tanks and the U.S. government. The statistical findings provide evidence that corporate campaign contributions, corporate inter-locks with think tanks and the federal government, and an interlocking directorate systematically increased U.S. counternarcotic aid to eighty recipient countries. And since drug enforcement policy making toward Colombia and Mexico also demonstrated that congressional funding for the drug war is a source of corporate revenues, the chapter concludes by utilizes a time-series cross section statistical analysis that shows that increasing levels of counternarcotic aid flows increases corporate capital accumulation again confirming that the case study findings are generalizable.
Corporate campaign contributions and abnormal stock returns after presidential elections