How the N🚫ligarchy Score is Built

We track three ways companies spend money to shape government policy in their favor: • Lobbying spend — how much each company pays registered lobbyists to influence federal legislation and regulation, from quarterly Senate lobbying disclosures. • PAC & executive donations — contributions from the company's political action committee and personal donations from C-suite executives, matched from FEC campaign finance records. Companies that donate meaningfully to both parties in the same election cycle earn an "Access Buyer" flag — a pattern associated with purchasing influence regardless of who wins. • Lobbying network — the score worsens when a company routes spending through insider firms: lobbyists who previously worked in government (revolving-door hires), and firms that also lobby for multiple other large corporations. The same dollar buys more access when it flows through the right people. Each company is ranked against all others we track, so the score reflects relative behavior — not an arbitrary dollar threshold. A company spending $5M on lobbying looks very different when its competitors spend $50M.

We look at two ways companies extract value for shareholders and executives rather than sharing it with workers: • CEO-to-worker pay ratio — how much the CEO earns compared to the median employee, from required SEC disclosures. A ratio of 300:1 means the CEO earns in one day what the median worker earns in a year. • Buyback intensity — the share of annual revenue spent buying back the company's own stock. Buybacks return cash directly to shareholders rather than reinvesting in wages, workers, or the business. When a company receives government subsidies and also conducts significant buybacks, an additional penalty applies — it signals public money flowing to private shareholders rather than the public interest it was meant to serve. Note: both data sources are SEC filings, which only public companies are required to submit. For private companies (e.g. Cargill, Koch Industries), we estimate the CEO pay ratio using the median ratio for their industry sector, derived from public company disclosures — this is labeled on their score card. Private companies don't do public buybacks, so we replace that half of the score with the strongest public evidence of shareholder extraction we can find: a court-confirmed settlement, a documented debt-funded dividend or asset transfer, verified proof the company carries no owner debt at all, or — absent any of that — a neutral score. See "The Private-Company Capital Ladder" below for how this works.

We track total regulatory fines over the past decade, measured as a proportion of company revenue — a $10 million fine means something very different for a $500 million company versus a $500 billion one. Violations are drawn from Good Jobs First's Violation Tracker, covering environmental penalties, labor law violations, consumer protection fines, and financial enforcement actions. A Subsidized Offender penalty (−10 pts) applies when a company received more than $1 million in public subsidies while also accumulating fines worth more than three times those subsidies. A company shouldn't be collecting taxpayer support while simultaneously breaking the rules designed to protect the public.

Being large doesn't make a company bad. But size amplifies influence in ways that go beyond a bigger budget. A company controlling 40% of its retail category can shape wages across an entire industry, set terms that suppliers have no real power to refuse, and absorb regulatory penalties that would cripple a smaller competitor. The same lobbying dollar, the same executive pay ratio, the same pattern of buybacks — all of these carry more societal weight when they come from a dominant player. To reflect that, we make the Political Access and Wealth Extraction scores hit harder for companies with dominant market share. A company spending $5M on lobbying looks very different when it controls a third of its category than when it controls 2%. Market share is calculated from SEC annual reports and Census retail trade data. Private company revenues use disclosed or estimated figures, labeled accordingly. Market Scale doesn't produce a score of its own — it amplifies the effect of the other two pillars for companies with real market power.

US-headquartered companies earn a small bonus — but only if they're already behaving well enough to reach the Moderate tier: • +4 pts — Trusted tier (score ≥75) • +2 pts — Moderate tier (50–74) • +0 pts — Concerning or Avoid tier (<50) Foreign-headquartered companies receive no bonus. The reasoning: domestic companies are more directly accountable to US consumers, workers, and regulators. That accountability is worth something — but it doesn't offset bad behavior.