Trade groups such as the Chamber are among those that the CED says are responsible for obscuring money in politics. Together with unions and nonprofits, groups that don’t disclose their donors invested more than $335 million in the 2012 federal elections, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics.
The survey of executives found that 86 percent said transparency in the campaign-finance system isn’t adequate. Accompanying the poll is a CED report calling for more donor disclosure.
“Political donors and spenders are finding it increasingly easy to avoid public scrutiny, as a growing number of organizations take advantage of porous rules to finance campaign activity without revealing the sources of their funding,” wrote Anthony Corrado, project director of CED’s Money in Politics and a professor of government specializing in campaign finance at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Distaste for the campaign-finance system bridges Democrats and Republicans, according to the survey, with 71 percent of self-identified Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans saying that major contributors have too much influence on politicians.
SEC Rule
Almost all of the surveyed Democratic executives, as well as 79 percent of Republican executives, said they would favor an SEC rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose political spending.
Increasingly, companies are voluntarily making that information public. A September 2012 study by the Washington-based Center for Political Accountability found that 45 of 88 companies provide information about their corporate donations, up from 36 a year earlier.
The Committee for Economic Development’s survey of executives’ views comes a month after a Sunlight Foundation report analyzed “elite” donors. That report found that just 0.01 percent of the U.S. population accounted for 28 percent of the total $6 billion spent in the 2012 elections.
About 16.5 percent of those 31,385 elite donors listed their occupation as “CEO” or “chairman” of a company, according to the foundation, a Washington-based group that advocates for increased government transparency.