Skip Navigation


Political Analysis Advance Access originally published online on April 13, 2007
Political Analysis 2008 16(1):3-20; doi:10.1093/pan/mpm009
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
16/1/3    most recent
mpm009v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Clinton, J. D.
Right arrow Articles by Lewis, D. E.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Expert Opinion, Agency Characteristics, and Agency Preferences

Joshua D. Clinton

Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540

David E. Lewis

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540 e-mail: delewis{at}princeton.edu

e-mail: clinton{at}princeton.edu (corresponding author)

The study of bureaucracies and their relationship to political actors is central to understanding the policy process in the United States. Studying this aspect of American politics is difficult because theories of agency behavior, effectiveness, and control often require measures of administrative agencies' policy preferences, and appropriate measures are hard to find for a broad spectrum of agencies. We propose a method for measuring agency preferences based upon an expert survey of agency preferences for 82 executive agencies in existence between 1988 and 2005. We use a multirater item response model to provide a principled structure for combining subjective ratings based on scholarly and journalistic expertise with objective data on agency characteristics. We compare the resulting agency preference estimates and standard errors to existing alternative measures, discussing both the advantages and limitations of the method.

Authors' note: We thank Tom Hammond, George Krause, and Joshua Tucker for helpful comments. We are grateful to Simon Jackman and Shawn Treier for generously providing their code and our survey respondents for their time and expertise.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Administration & SocietyHome page
J. D. Villalobos and J. S. Vaughn
Presidential Staffing and Public Opinion: How Public Opinion Influences Politicization
Administration Society, July 1, 2009; 41(4): 449 - 469.
[Abstract] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.