Replication data for: Expert Opinion, Agency Characteristics, and Agency Preferences

The study of bureaucracies and their relationship to political actors is central to understanding the policy process in the United States. Our study of this aspect of American politics is hindered by the fact that theories of agency behavior, effectiveness and control often require measures of administrative agencies' policy preferences. Appropriate measures have been hard to come by across a broad spectrum of agencies. We propose a method for measuring agency preferences. We conduct an expert survey on agency preferences for 82 executive agencies in existence between 1988 and 2005 and we use a multirater item response model to measure agency preferences and accounts for rater differences in their degree of discrimination and their implicit thresholds for what constitutes a liberal or conservative agency. We compare the resulting agency ideal point estimates and standard errors to existing alternative measures.