The Effects of Citizens United on Corporate Spending in the 2012 Presidential Election

The 2012 presidential election saw a 594% increase in independent expenditures from the 2008 election ($144 million in 2008 to $1 billion in 2012), leaving little doubt that the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United decision opened the campaign spending floodgates. To what extent are corporations, the main subject of the ruling, the source of the increase? We argue that while Citizens alters the ability of corporations to spend on campaigns, it may not alter their substantial risk in doing so. Utilizing an original dataset of political activity and campaign contributions by Fortune 500 companies, we explore whether Citizens United affected corporations’ overall contribution strategies. We find that major corporations were not a source of the dramatic increase in independent spending in the 2012 election and that their spending behavior more generally did not change as a result of the Citizens United ruling.