This proposal presents a method for using federal employee campaign contributions to estimate the political ideology of U.S. federal government agencies across time. The method applies to other national governmental contexts and it generates data researchers can use to test formal models concerning government bureaucracies.

The growing significance of administrative agencies in the modern state offers reason for studying the political ideologies of non-elected public bureaucrats. Elected politicians have expanded the set of policies civil servants must implement and have delegated considerable policy-making authority to non-elected administrators. However, information asymmetries provide opportunities for bureaucrats to manipulate policy outcomes to serve their personal agendas. Accordingly, securing compliance from civil servants remains challenging for elected politicians.

Basic research has specified formal models that illuminate this challenge and identify conditions conducive to political control. Empirically testing these theoretical predictions, however, has proven difficult: civil servants? policy preferences figure prominently in models of political control, yet estimates of civil servant ideology have remained elusive. Contemporary research has made progress in the estimation of bureaucratic policy preferences by enlisting the past political decisions of administrative officials, expert opinions, government employee surveys, the political history of agencies, and the public statements of top officials. In spite of this progress, estimates produced in past research still do not vary across time and they provide little insight into intra-agency ideological variation, thus inhibiting tests of dynamic models and the comparative static properties of equilibrium models.

This proposal describes a method that uses federal employee campaign contributions to estimate agency ideal points that can be compared across time and that can be used to study ideological variation within an agency. The proposed method tracks?from 1979 to the present?the campaign contributions of federal employees and uses the political activity of the contribution recipient to model the ideology of the donors. This approach produces time-varying estimates of both the typical political ideology of an agency?s bureaucrats and the ideological variation within each agency.