Divided we stand? Professional consensus and political conflict in academic economics

Karl Beyer and Stephan Puehringer ()
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Stephan Puehringer: Institute of Economics, Cusanus University of Bernkastel-Kues, Germany
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Stephan Pühringer

No 94, ICAE Working Papers from Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy

Abstract: This paper contributes to the debate on the role of normative values and political preferences among (publicly visible) economists in the US. For this purpose, we conduct a social network analysis on the signatories of economist petitions, which we identify as one channel for economists to exert public influence. We base our analysis on a set of 68 public policy petitions from 2008-2017 in the United States with more than 5,700 signatories and check the robustness of our results with three sub-networks. Our contribution is twofold: On the one hand, we provide an extended empirical basis for the debate on consensus in economics and the role of political preferences and normative values in economics. On the other hand, this paper offers a viable tool to trace the normative charging of (prospective) economist petitions and economists based on the social structure of petition networks. The main empirical finding of our paper is that there is a very strong partisan divide among petition-signing economists in the United States, which mirrors the cleavage within the US political system. We also find that the bipartite partisan structure of the economist petition network increases with the political involvement of economist. This divide is particularly stark in the field of fiscal policy, while it is to a lesser extent also present in other fields of public policy. A greater tendency towards consensus, in turn, can be found with respect to monetary policy, carbon pricing, immigration or free trade or market-based decision tools in general.

Keywords: social network analysis; social studies of economics; normative values; public economists; economist petitions; United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hme, nep-hpe, nep-pol and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Working Paper: Divided we stand? Professional consensus and political conflict in academic economics (2019)
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