Elections and Wall Street: Taking Stock of Parties and Presidents

Abstract

he interface between economic enterprise and political processes in Western, capitalist democracies is a subject of longstanding interest to social scientists. As it has been operationalized in recent work in political science, however, the term has been equated with macroeconomic conditions. Thus most contemporary work in this context has had little to do with the business community itself. As scholarly interest in the subject of economics and politics has developed, the more particular interest in business and politics has tended to atrophy. The classic work on politics and the national business community, American Business and Public Policy (Bauer, Pool and Dexter 1963), seems not to have spawned other classics. We wish to resurrect that focus on business in this paper as we examine the relationship between national electoral forces and that symbol of American business, Wall Street.