Do business contributions to political parties convey different messages in different countries, and, if so, why? This is the first cross-national study of firm behaviour in political finance. It understands motivations for contributions to parties as either ideological or pragmatic. Motivation is inferred by quantitatively relating the payments of 960 firms to variations in political competition in three countries over periods of between seven and seventeen years. In co-ordinated Germany, a small number of firms make ideological payments. In liberal Canada and Australia, large numbers of firms made pragmatic payments. Australia’s left-right party system created an awareness of policy risk, which motivated ideological payments, but there was no ideological bias in business financing of politics in Canada’s unusually non-ideological party system. The statistical analysis is supplemented by a qualitative investigation of discrete and reciprocal exchanges between businesses and political parties.