Replication Data for \"Characterizing Agencies’ Political Environments: Partisan Agreement and Disagreement in the U.S. Executive Branch\"

Theories of political control of the bureaucracy place conflict between agencies and political principals, or between political principals themselves, at the center of bureaucratic politics. Important scholarship develops measures of agency ideology to characterize this conflict. However, much of what federal agencies do is not ideological. Furthermore, some agencies have ideological missions about which Republicans and Democrats often agree. In this short article, I develop a novel measure of partisan disagreement to illustrate variation in the magnitude of partisan conflict faced by 93 agencies. I show that this measure captures partisan conflict not revealed by estimates of agency ideology and that agencies with extreme ideology estimates may face low or moderate partisan conflict. I conclude that empirical tests of theories of political control of the bureaucracy should take a more realistic approach to characterizing partisan conflict faced by federal agencies.