Does Owning a Business Push People to the Political Right? A Stanford Study Says Yes

Picture a hard-working small business owner, maybe someone who operates a car dealership, a consulting business, or a fast-food franchise. If I tell you nothing else about this person, would you guess they’re more likely to vote for Republican or Democratic? 

I am willing to go out on a limb and guess most of us would say Republican.

The image of small business owners as steady, practical, hard-working and interested in pro-growth, pro-business policies aligns with the traditional Republican brand, after all. The extremely high-profile recent shift of Silicon Valley founders towards the right only underlines the link between entrepreneurs and Republicans. Add to this everyday interactions with entrepreneurs and the scales tip decisively towards the right in many people’s minds. 

But does data back up this intuition? And perhaps more interestingly, if gut feel proves correct, why is it exactly that most small business owners tend to lean right in their politics? A large new Stanford study dug into these questions with interesting results. 

Data shows small business owners do lean right

For the study, published in the British Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers out of Stanford and University College London used a few clever methods to get a handle on small business owners’ political loyalties and motivations. 

The first was the most straightforward: just ask them. The team looked at two historical polls that included questions on self employment and political affiliation and found, “both surveys showed that self-employed Americans were more likely to lean Republican,” according to Insights by Stanford Business 

That even held true after controlling for demographic characteristics like race, gender, education, and income that tend to influence voting patterns. The researchers then broadened their lens, looking at similar data internationally. In Japan, Germany, and Australia small business owners tend to lean right politically as well. 

Finally, they compared doctors who own their own practices to those employed by others. Would self-employed physicians have different politics from the otherwise demographically similar doctors who work for someone else? The answer was yes again. 

Self-employed doctors were up to 5 percentage points more likely to register as Republicans and up to 6 percentage points more likely to donate to Republican candidates. 

Why do small business owners tend to be Republican? 

This last finding is particularly interesting as it suggests that it’s not just that those who lean Republican tend to become small business owners. Rather it looks like owning your own business tends to nudge people to the right. 

The researchers came up with another crafty way to test if this hypothesis was correct. And if it was correct, why entrepreneurs generally move rightwards. They used data from the Covid-era Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to identify small business owners. Then they surveyed them about their personalities, as well as their political and social views. 

Confirming what the previous evidence suggested, the small business owners again leaned right. As a group they were 18 percent more likely to vote Republican. This wasn’t because of their more generally conservative temperament, the data revealed. Instead, the primary reason for their preference for Republicans was dislike of government regulation.  

“The experience of running a small business — especially when other employees are involved — increases the likelihood of having to deal with onerous government regulations, which in turn influences one’s political views rightward,” the co-authors concluded.

Everyday intuition confirmed 

This is hardly the most shocking research finding ever published. As Gene Marks, founder of small business consulting firm The Marks Group, explained on The Hill, these findings align with his impressions of entrepreneurs after working closely with them for 20 years.  

“Business owners, though optimistic and opportunistic, are also generally wary and untrusting,” he writes. “Like the rest of us, they know that politicians lie for a living. Tax cuts, economic growth, grants and investments are promised and then never materialize. All things being equal, they would rather hear less from their government leaders than believe in promises that are often broken.”

Republicans, traditionally, have promised to meddle less. They’ve been rewarded with the votes of more small business owners. Politicians interested in reversing this trend will need to flip the expectations of entrepreneurs. 

The way to earn an entrepreneur’s political support, this research confirms, is to convince them you’ll stay out of their way. The way to lose it is to give them even more things to worry about.