Adam Bonica

Mapping the Ideological Marketplace

I develop a method to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors using campaign finance data. Combined with a data set of over 100 million contribution records from state and federal elections, the method estimates ideal points for an expansive range of political actors. The common pool of contributors who give across institutions and levels of politics makes it possible to recover a unified set of ideological measures for members of Congress, the president and executive branch, state legislators, governors, and other state officials, as well as the interest groups and individuals who make political donations. Since candidates fundraise regardless of incumbency status, the method estimates ideal points for both incumbents and nonincumbents. After establishing measure validity and addressing issues concerning strategic behavior, I present results for a variety of political actors and discuss several promising avenues of research made possible by the new measures.

The political polarization of physicians in the United States: an analysis of campaign contributions to federal elections, 1991 through 2012.

IMPORTANCE Few current data are available regarding the political behavior of American physicians as the number of female physicians has increased and the number of solo practitioners has decreased. OBJECTIVE To analyze campaign contributions that physicians made from the 1991 to 1992 through the 2011 to 2012 election cycles to Republican and Democratic candidates in presidential and congressional races and to partisan organizations, including party committees and super political action committees (Super PACs). DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS We explored partisan differences in physician contributions by sex, for-profit vs nonprofit practice setting, and specialty using multiple regression analysis. We studied the relation between the variation in the mean annual income across specialties and the mean percentage of physicians within each specialty contributing to Republicans. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Differences in contributions to Republicans and Democrats, for all physicians and for subgroups. RESULTS Between the 1991 to 1992 and the 2011 to 2012 election cycles, physician campaign contributions increased from

Senate Gate-Keeping, Presidential Staffing of "Inferior Offices," and the Ideological Composition of Appointments to the Public Bureaucracy

20 million to

The Politics of Selecting the Bench from the Bar: The Legal Profession and Partisan Incentives to Politicize the Judiciary

189 million, and the percentage of active physicians contributing increased from 2.6% to 9.4%. Of physicians who contributed during the study period, the mean percentage contributing to Republicans was 57% for men and 31% for women. Since 1996, the percentage of physicians contributing to Republicans has decreased, to less than 50% in the 2007 to 2008 election cycle and again in the 2011 to 2012 election cycle. Contributions to Republicans in 2011 to 2012 were more prevalent among men vs women (52.3% vs 23.6%), physicians practicing in for-profit vs nonprofit organizations (53.2% vs 25.6%), and surgeons vs pediatricians (70.2% vs 22.1%). In 1991 to 1992, these contribution gaps were smaller: for sex, 54.5% vs 30.9%; for organizations, 54.2% vs 40.0%; and for specialty, 65.5% vs 32.7%. The percentage of physicians contributing to Republicans across specialties correlated 0.84 with the mean log earnings of each specialty; specialties with higher mean earnings had higher percentages of physicians contributing to Republicans. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Between 1991 and 2012, the political alignment of US physicians shifted from predominantly Republican toward the Democrats. The variables driving this change, including the increasing percentage of female physicians and the decreasing percentage of physicians in solo and small practices, are likely to drive further changes.

Measuring public spending preferences using an interactive budgeting questionnaire

Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives both the Senate and the President a role in the appointment of public bureaucrats. Yet, since the drafting of that constitutional passage, changes within the Senate and Executive have created new ways for ocials to influence who gets appointed to the public bureaucracy. The Senate has developed intricate vetting procedures within its committees, while the Executive Branch has created new methods — such as the

The Political Alignment of US Physicians: An Update Including Campaign Contributions to the Congressional Midterm Elections in 2014.

The American judiciary has increasingly come under attack as polarized and politicized. Using a newly collected dataset that captures the ideological positioning of nearly half a million judges and lawyers who have made campaign contributions, we present empirical evidence showing politicization through various tiers of the judicial hierarchy. We show that the higher the court, the more conservative and more polarized it becomes, in contrast with the broader population of attorneys, who tend to be liberal. These findings suggest that political actors not only appear to rely on ideology in the selection of judges, but that they strategically prioritize higher courts. To our knowledge, our study is the first to provide a direct ideological comparison across tiers of the judiciary and between judges and lawyers, and also the first to document how--and why--American courts are politicized.

A Data-Driven Voter Guide for U.S. Elections: Adapting Quantitative Measures of the Preferences and Priorities of Political Elites to Help Voters Learn About Candidates

This paper considers an innovative approach to measuring public spending preferences using an interactive budgeting questionnaire. After being presented with the President’s requested budget for the upcoming fiscal year, survey respondents were asked to adjust spending levels in line with their personal preferences, subject to budgetary trade-offs. An analysis of survey results reveals that responses sharply contrast with those recovered by traditional survey measures. The results are then used to examine the relationship between fiscal preferences and self-reported ideology, and to explore the structure of budgetary preferences. It is found that preferences scale to two substantive dimensions: the first measures the trade-off between security and non-security spending and strongly correlates with self-reported ideology; and the second reveals a crosscutting cleavage that has attracted little, if any, attention in previous research. Specifically, it measures each respondent’s relative preference for rival and non-rival government goods and services.

Physicians’ political preferences and the delivery of end of life care in the United States: retrospective observational study

The Political Alignment of US Physicians: An Update Including Campaign Contributions to the Congressional Midterm Elections in 2014 We recently reported that between 1991 and 2012, the political alignment of American physicians shifted from predominantly Republican toward the Democrats.1 In 2014, the Republican surge changed party control of Congress: the Republicans gained 9 Senate seats and became the majority party there, and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives increased to the largest since 1928. To determine if the political alignment of physicians also shifted toward Republicans, we studied their campaign contributions to federal elections in 2013 and 2014. We found that physicians’ campaign contributions did not shift to the Republicans, in contrast to the change in the public’s voting behavior. In general, the shift in campaign contributions toward the Democrats that prevailed in 2011 to 2012 and earlier election cycles continued, even in the 9 states where the Republicans gained Senate seats.

The Legal Academy's Ideological Uniformity

Abstract: Internet-based voter advice applications have experienced tremendous growth across Europe in recent years but have yet to be widely adopted in the United States. By comparison, the candidate-centered U.S. electoral system, which routinely requires voters to consider dozens of candidates across a dizzying array of local, state, and federal offices each time they cast a ballot, introduces challenges of scale to the systematic provision of information. Only recently have methodological advances combined with the rapid growth in publicly available data on candidates and their supporters to bring a comprehensive data-driven voter guide within reach. This paper introduces a set of newly developed software tools for collecting, disambiguating, and merging large amounts of data on candidates and other political elites. It then demonstrates how statistical methods developed by political scientists to measure the preferences and expressed priorities of politicians can be adapted to help voters learn about candidates.

The Politics of Selecting the Bench from the Bar: The Legal Profession and Partisan Incentives to Introduce Ideology into Judicial Selection

Abstract Objectives To compare the delivery of end of life care given to US Medicare beneficiaries in hospital by internal medicine physicians with Republican versus Democrat political affiliations. Design Retrospective observational study. Setting US Medicare. Participants Random sample of Medicare beneficiaries, who were admitted to hospital in 2008-12 with a general medical condition, and died in hospital or shortly thereafter. Main outcome measures Total inpatient spending, intensive care unit use, and intensive end of life treatments (eg, mechanical ventilation and gastrostomy tube insertion) among patients dying in hospital, and hospice referral among patients discharged but at high predicted risk of 30 day mortality after discharge. Physicians were categorized as Democrat, Republican, or non-donors, using federal political contribution data. Results Among 1 480 808 patients, 93 976 (6.3%) were treated by 1523 Democratic physicians, 58 876 (4.0%) by 768 Republican physicians, and 1 327 956 (89.6%) by 23 627 non-donor physicians. Patient demographics and clinical characteristics were similar between groups. Democrat physicians were younger, more likely to be female, and more likely to have graduated from a top 20 US medical school than Republican physicians. Mean end of life spending, after adjustment for patient covariates and hospital specific fixed effects, was US