Over the last century and a half, the American state has at times been swayed by popular movements and cowed by the threat of uprisings, and parts of it have been captured intermittently by reformers. But as shown by the recent election of a billionaire president and his appointment of a corporate cabinet which has ruthlessly pursued a pro-capitalist agenda, the state remains dominated by the ruling class.

The Trump administration may be egregiously corporate, but it’s not exactly unique. A new paper by Timothy Gill called “The Persistence of the Power Elite: Presidential Cabinets and Corporate Interlocks, 1968–2018” looks at state-corporate relations through presidential cabinet appointments. He finds that the door between big business and the White House has been revolving for a very long time.

Gill’s study follows on the research of Peter Freitag, who in the journal Social Problems analyzed corporate-political interlocks from 1897 through 1973. He did this by looking into the biography of presidential cabinet appointments to see how many of those individuals came from and re-entered the corporate sphere. Freitag found that 76 percent of cabinet members were interlocked with business. Republican administrations’ interlock rates were higher than Democrats’, but only slightly — 78 percent compared to 73 percent respectively.