The inside view: Using the Enron E-mail archive to understand corporate political attention

Abstract

For decades, scholars have debated the role of corporations in American politics. To date, they have relied on either interviews or publicly disclosed spending and lobbying reports. This article presents new methods and data that enable us to consider the internal processes of corporate political attention instead. Aided by automated content analysis, this article uses more than 250,000 internal e-mails from Enron to observe its political attention between 1999 and 2002. These e-mails depict Enron's employees as focused on monitoring and formally participating in political processes, including bureaucratic processes. Only a small fraction of their political attention focused on elections. © 2013 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa.