Like most Americans, CEOs frequently have strong political beliefs. Unlike most of us, however, they also have hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand to donate to candidates they agree with.
Crowdpac, a company working toward more transparency and widespread participation in campaign finance, used campaign finance records from the Federal Election Commission from the last several decades to find out how liberal or conservative various donors are.
Crowdpac's scoring system evaluates where politicians and campaign donors fall on the left-right spectrum based on who is donating to whom and voting records. Liberal donors will donate to liberal candidates; conservatives running for office will seek out conservative donors. By tracking the relationships between donors and candidates, Crowdpac was able to assign ideology scores to candidates and donors alike.
Crowdpac provided Business Insider with the ideology scores and 2014 donation totals of the most liberal Fortune 500 CEOs. Here are those CEOs and Crowdpac's scores for how liberal they are:
And here's the total amount they each donated in the 2014 election cycle:
To see more, check out Crowdpac's website here.