Mitchell Langbert, writing in Econ Journal Watch documents the ratio of Democrat/Republican Party affiliation and campaign contributions in the American Economic Association. Here is the bottom line
The most interesting part of the paper that the AEA skews more and more Democrat as you look higher up the hierarchy to who has more influence in the organization.
Members are only 3.8:1 D/R rather than 1.3:1 in the population. If you think all economists are heartless conservatives, you are wrong. My impression is, however, that this ratio is much more politically diverse than at other social science associations.
As we move up to editors, authors, officers, the ratios rise, to reveal a nearly complete absence of Republicans in positions of power within the organization.
As Mitchell puts it
There is no selection in mere membership apart from self-selection. Anyone can join, and some Republican voters do join. The players, however, are elevated in one way or another by the organization. The player categories are officers, editors, authors, book reviewers, and acknowledgees (those thanked in published acknowledgments)....The players are largely devoid of Republicans.
Editors are, in my view, the ones with the most discretionary power in a professional organization. They decide what gets published and what does not get published in the association's journals. They have, rightly in my view, great discretion in this decision. Finding innovative research and plowing through the fog generated by the refereeing process is difficult and important. Second place goes to the president-elect who puts together the annual meeting schedule for the same reason.
What to make of it? Well, facts are facts. The AEA plainly has almost no political diversity in its operational roles. The AEA's official statement on racial diversity states that a divergence in percentages between AEA membership and general population is proof of a "hostile" "climate," so perhaps the AEA should draw the same conclusion regarding political diversity. But I will not draw this conclusion. The social processes that produce political conformity are much more complex than that, and I still believe in the possibility of control variables, reverse casualty, selection bias, and all the other delicate issues that trouble causal inference in the social sciences. Maybe, as I'm sure some of you will say, Democrats are just plain right, Republicans deplorable, and anyone with a brain can see that. (Update: 3 hours later, and commenters already chimed in with that one.) AEA officers are elected by the membership, and people with big names in research from the top universities seem to win elections, along with big-name ex-public officials. (Ben Bernanke, R, and Janet Yellen, D, top examples.) Editors are appointed. So this fact may simply be a reflection of the fact that the big-name saltwater departments skew Democrat, and their PhD students and personal network thus does the same. Maybe research that advocates new or expanded programs sells better than research that documents unintended consequences of existing programs. Add your own speculations. Since registration and campaign contribution data are public, these are easy hypotheses to check. It would also be interesting to see how other organizations, including the Econometric Society and SED stack up.
Most obviously, nobody knows the party affiliation of AEA members when voting, appointing, etc. This paper had to put together the data. So, party affiliation is a correlate of something else, and the nature of that other thing should be the troubling question.
For today, it is just a surprising fact to ponder.
No, there are not a lot of independents and libertarians skewing the result.
For readers who do not know,
The American Economic Association (AEA) is the most influential professional association of economists in the United States, and by extension the world. It publishes eight journals, which place highly in standard rankings. ... The AEA runs the Allied Social Science Associations Annual Meeting, which for professional economics is both the premier conference for researchers to show their work and the centerpiece of the academic job market. Those who oversee the AEA have a profound impact on the profession. Publication in AEA journals and executive roles in the AEA are coveted and important stepping stones in economists’ careers.
Update
A few correspondents remind me that I have been too kind to the AEA. Yes, there are elections, but the candidates are all selected by an AEA committee. There is no primary. (You can write in "suggestions" for the committee to consider for next year's ballot.) The candidate information offers no statement about what they wish to do for the AEA, it is just an academic bio. Jane got her PhD from Harvard in xx, taught at MIT from yy to zz, published so many articles in the American Economic Review, and so on. There is no place for a statement, "If elected, I will do x at the the AEA," whether that is "advance diversity goals," or "bring more openness, political and intellectual diversity to the organization." High school class president elections have more policy statements from the candidates. That this system produces more of the same from the same club is not that surprising.
The system evolved when AEA service was uncontroversial, and really just a professional honor recognizing research accomplishments. That there is little correlation between research success and organizational ability didn't really matter. But the AEA is taking a much more active and activist role, so that system may have outlived its usefulness.
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