Economic Scene: Business Losing Clout in a G.O.P. Moving Right

How did corporate America lose control of the Republican Party?

From overhauling immigration laws to increasing spending on the nation’s aging infrastructure, big business leaders have seemed relatively powerless lately as the uncompromising Republicans they helped elect have steadfastly opposed some of their core legislative priorities.

The rift is not only unusual in light of the tight historical alignment between the business community and the G.O.P., but it is also outright incomprehensible after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed companies to spend unlimited amounts from their corporate treasuries on the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Scholars have proposed many reasons for the rise of the anti-government activists that are pulling the G.O.P. to the right, leaving it at odds with a business community used to compromising and seeking favors from government.

But what may be most surprising is how reluctant big business has been to put its money on the line. To put it mildly, if companies could purchase the Congress of their choice, it’s unlikely they would buy the gridlocked Congress we have. The seemingly inexorable rise of political partisans — mainly on the right, but on the left, too — suggests that corporate money may be playing a much smaller role in the political process than expected.

Concern about the potential consequences of Citizens United stem from a not unreasonable belief that businesses will do anything on this side of the law — and sometimes beyond it — to produce legislation that serves their corporate interests.

So when the Supreme Court opened the sluice gate in 2010 allowing unlimited campaign contributions, pretty much every liberal voice in the country believed that a flood of corporate cash was about to deliver the political system to the Republican Party.

It was, President Obama said, “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

Three years later, however, these fears have not quite materialized. Money is flowing to elections like never before. The 2012 elections cost some $6.3 billion, $1 billion more than the 2008 elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that researches money and politics. Independent spending by outside groups on campaign advertisements and the like topped $1 billion last year.

Corporate America, however, accounted for a comparative trickle. Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford University, points out in a recent working paper that companies openly spent about $75 million from their treasuries on federal elections last year.

Even if all the hidden money funneled into campaigns through private 501(c) organizations had come from businesses — unlikely given the contributions by noncorporate groups like Planned Parenthood and the N.R.A. — corporate spending would not reach $400 million, still a small share of the total.

Perhaps this should not be surprising. For companies, spending on elections can be risky. Business executives might prefer lobbying, where they spend far more than on campaign contributions, not because the limits are more relaxed but because swaying legislators on both sides of the aisle is more effective at getting what they want. And such lobbying is less likely to kindle anger among consumers, shareholders and other constituents than spending to change the outcome of elections.

“While Citizens alters the ability of corporations to contribute to campaigns, it does not alter their substantial risk in doing so,” the political scientists Wendy L. Hansen, Michael Rocca and Brittany Ortiz of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, argued in a recent study.

Still, corporations’ reluctance to open their checkbooks suggests an intriguing alternative explanation for the rise of Republicans who are willing to defy their will: companies may have spent too little. Their money was swamped by that of big individual donors who are more ideologically extreme. In 2012, the top 0.1 percent of donors contributed more than 44 percent of all campaign contributions. In 1980 their share of contributions was less than 10 percent.

Corporations have a pro-Republican bias, of course. But it is not quite as extreme as pop culture would have it, and is certainly less pronounced than organized labor’s pro-Democrat leanings.

Effective lobbying requires both Republican and Democratic friends. Political action committees run by businesses are known for spreading money on both sides of the partisan divide. They give to incumbents. They choose winners. They show little partisan loyalty.

In the 2006 elections, when the G.O.P. controlled Congress, corporate PACs gave 65 percent of their money to Republicans. In 2008 and 2010, after the Democrats had swept both the House and Senate, they split their contributions roughly fifty-fifty.

By contrast, substantial research in political science suggests that individual donors favor more ideological candidates and are less strategic in their giving. Big, frequent donors are particularly extreme.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo

Drug Makers Losing a Bid to Foil Generic Painkillers

In coming months, generic drug producers are expected to introduce cheaper versions of OxyContin and Opana, two long-acting narcotic painkillers, or opioids, that are widely abused.

But in hopes of delaying the move to generics, the makers of the brand name drugs, Purdue Pharma and Endo Pharmaceuticals, have introduced versions that are more resistant to crushing or melting, techniques abusers use to release the pills’ narcotic payloads.

The two drug makers, which say they are motivated not by profit but by public safety, have also been waging a multifront political and legal war to block sales of generics that are not tamper-resistant.

The companies argue that the older designs will feed street demand for strong painkillers, drugs that are involved in more than 15,000 overdose-related deaths a year. While some experts say the new tamper-resistant products are not a cure-all for the abuse problem, others say they represent an important step forward.

“I think it would be a shame if the government would allow generics to come in without any tamper-resistant properties,” said Dr. Lynn R. Webster, a specialist in Salt Lake City who has consulted with companies developing such safeguards. Over the last year, Purdue Pharma and Endo have backed legislation in Congress that would require many opioids to be tamper-resistant, and lobbied in favor of similar state laws.

They have also urged the Food and Drug Administration to give their tamper-resistant designs a stamp of safety approval that other manufacturers would have to match. The agency does not currently differentiate between drugs that have abuse-resistant qualities and those that do not.

Thus far, the companies’ efforts have failed. In mid-December, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit by Endo that would have blocked the F.D.A. from allowing generic versions of its drug, Opana, to go on sale in January. A recent effort by some doctors and local officials in Canada to deter sales of generic versions of OxyContin there fell flat. While companies like Purdue Pharma insist the public’s health is their main concern, others note that producers introduced tamper-resistant versions of their products just as the drugs were about to lose patent protection. In court papers filed in response to Endo’s lawsuit, the F.D.A. described the company’s action as a “thinly veiled attempt to maintain its market share and block generic competition.”

An F.D.A. official, Dr. Douglas C. Throckmorton, said the agency expected to issue guidance this month that would lay out the types of scientific data that drug producers would have to submit to support a claim that an opioid’s design or formulation helped to deter its abuse.

Companies are developing a variety of methods to do that. The new OxyContin pill turns into a gummy mass when an abuser crushes it, and the Opana pill is designed to break into large pieces when manipulated. Other methods include pills that contain a second drug reversing the opioid’s narcotic effects if taken inappropriately.

“We understand the value in developing appropriate abuse-resistant technology and we want to find a way of incentivizing that,” said Dr. Throckmorton, the F.D.A.’s deputy director for regulatory programs. “But we also understand the value of generics for patients.”

A study published in 2012 in a medical journal, The Journal of Pain, found that the percentage of people treated at drug-abuse clinics who reported abusing OxyContin fell significantly since the introduction of the tamper-resistant version.

Some of those abusers said they had switched to other long-acting opioids that were easier to abuse like Opana — before its reformulation — or to illicit drugs like heroin, according to the study, which was financed by Purdue Pharma.

But the generic versions of OxyContin and Opana are expected to be significantly cheaper than the tamper-resistant versions of those drugs. At time of introduction in late 2010, the price of the new version of OxyContin was about $6 per 40 milligram tablet, the same then as the price that was not tamper-resistant. Since then, the price of the new version has risen to about $6.80 for that strength tablet. Opana costs about the same amount for a pill of the same pain-killing strength.