Jowei Chen
Jowei Chen
Associate Professor,
Department of Political Science,
University of Michigan

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Individual-Level Ideology Estimates of US Federal Bureaucrats

Authors:

Jowei Chen (University of Michigan)
Tim Johnson (Atkinson Graduate School of Management, Willamette University)

In a forthcoming article, we estimate the ideological scores of federal bureaucrats on the Poole and Rosenthal NOMINATE Common Space scale. We use campaign contributions of bureaucratic employees as a means of estimating these bureaucrats' ideologies and comparing these estimates with the Common Space scores of political actors in other institutions. Our method produces individual-level ideology estimates for bureaucratic employees listed in the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) Central Personnel Data File (CPDF) in 2007 and 2010.

Data Citation:

Jowei Chen and Tim Johnson, 2014. Federal Employee Unionization and Presidential Control of the Bureaucracy: Estimating and Explaining Ideological Change in Executive Agencies. Forthcoming, Journal of Theoretical Politics.

Download Agency-Level Ideal Point Estimates (Excel CSV data file):

Chen_Johnson_CommonSpaceScores2007.txt
Chen_Johnson_CommonSpaceScores2010.txt

Variables:
year: Year in which CPDF was published (2007 or 2010)
OPMabbrev: Standardized 2-letter agency abbreviation in the Office of Personnel Management's Central Personnel Data File
OPMcode1: Standardized 4-character agency or subagency abbreviation in the Office of Personnel Management's Central Personnel Data File
agency: Agency Name
ST: State in which the employee's work station is located
county: County in which the employee's work station is located
fullname: Employee's name in the CPDF, listed as LAST, FIRST MIDDLE
title: Employee's title, as listed in the CPDF
Common Space: Employee's estimated Common Space DW-NOMINATE (first dimension), for employees that have made sufficient campaign contributions during 1979-2012

Online Appendix:

Chen_Johnson_Unionization_Appendix.pdf

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