Welcome to the homepage of

Survey Project: Policy Views of Academics

Principal investigator: 
Daniel Klein, Professor of Economics George Mason University (dklein@gmu.edu)

The survey contains 57 questions about 18 policy issues, voting behavior, and background variables. During Spring 2003, 5486 surveys were sent out to members of academic associations. Here are the response numbers (excluding blanks and adjusting for PO Returns, etc.):

  surveys completed % response rate
Anthropology
349
34.9
Economics
264
26.6
History
297
30.9
Phil. (pol/legal)
108
22.6
Political Science
309
31.0
Sociology
351
35.2
Total
1678
30.9

 

This website provides the survey documents and the survey control documents (below).  Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern are working on a series of papers based on the data. The papers will be posted here as they become available. Eventually we will post here the complete dataset in an Excel file.

The survey was controlled and certified by Ms. Donna Perry, Assistant Dean, Administration/External Relations, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.


Survey documents (pdf):

  1. The Survey
  2. The cover-letter that accompanied the survey
  3. The follow-up postcard 



Survey Control documents (pdf):

  1. “Controller’s Statement,” by Donna Perry
  2. “Survey Process Description,” by Daniel Klein and Donna Perry
  3. “Survey Control Overview Table and Analysis,” prepared by Daniel Klein and confirmed and initialized line-by-line by Donna Perry
  4. “Daniel Klein’s Survey Procedure Statement,” by Daniel Klein
  5. “Irregulars Binder Manifest,” prepared by Daniel Klein and confirmed by Donna Perry



Research papers by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern:

Professor and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists, Critical Review 2006.
  • Appendix on Alternative Cluster Analyses by Charlotta Stern

    • Long reply to Zipp and Fenwick's POQ article, Society 2008.

    Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid -- This piece adapts groupthink theory to the setting of academia. Focusing especially on the micro mechanism of majoritarian departmental politics and the more macro cultural mechanism of the disciplinary pyramid, it offers a theory of how a bad worldview, once it reached a tipping point, could tend toward domination of the academic discipline and get locked-in. It was written for the 2009 AEI volume The Politically Correct University and reprinted in The Independent Review.

    By the Numbers: The Ideological Profile of Professors, in the 2009 AEI volume The Politically Correct University. The paper reviews all the data up to 2008 about professoriate ideology.

    How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities? Survey Evidence from Six Fields, working-paper pdf of the paper, which appeared in Academic Questions Winter 2004-05, Vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 40-52.

  • excel file of the Democrat to Republican ratios (data and color figure)
    •  
    Sociology and Classical Liberalism, The Independent Review.
    Is There A Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economic Association Members, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2007.


    Related work by Daniel Klein and coauthors:

    Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology, by Mitchell Langbert, Anthony J. Quain, and Daniel B. Klein, Econ Journal Watch 13(3), September 2016: 422-451.

    Voter-registration of 11 California schools:
    Faculty Partisan Affiliations in All Disciplines: A Voter-Registration Study by Christopher F. Cardiff and Daniel B. Klein, Critical Review, 2006 . (This paper really supersedes Klein-Western, which was confined to Berkeley and Stanford.) (Voter-reg study page)

    Embarrassed as a Non-Left Professor? Society, 2010.

    The Social Science Citation Index: A Black Box—with an Ideological Bias?
    by Daniel B. Klein with Eric Chiang, Econ Journal Watch, 2004.

    Institutional Ties of Journal of Development Economics Authors and Editors
    by Daniel B. Klein with Therese DiCola, Econ Journal Watch, 2004.

    The PhD Circle in Academic Economics
    by Daniel B. Klein, Econ Journal Watch, 2005.

    Sense and Sensibilities: Myrdal's Plea for Self-Disclosure and Some Disclosures about AEA Members by Daniel B. Klein, Econ Journal Watch, 2006.

    Review of Rothman, Woessner, and Kelly-Woessner book.

    [Daniel Klein's homepage]