Consensus, Polarization, and Alignment in the Economics Profession

Abstract

Scholars interested in the political influence of the economics profession debate whether the discipline is unified by policy consensus or divided among competing schools or factions. We address this question by reanalyzing a unique recent survey of elite economists. We present a theoretical framework based on a formal sociological approach to the structure of belief systems and propose alignment, rather than consensus or polarization, as a model for the structure of belief in the economics profession. Moreover, we argue that social clustering in a heterogeneous network topology is a better model for disciplinary social structure than discrete factionalization. Results show that there is a robust latent ideological dimension related to economists' departmental affiliations and political partisanship. Furthermore, we show that economists closer to one another in informal social networks also share more similar ideologies.

The Cultural-Cognitive Mapping of Scientific Professions

“…This provides a baseline picture of the relative cultural authority of two expert professions with partially overlapping domains of inquiry. 1 Consistent with a growing body of literature on economics’ advantage in professional salaries, policy influence, and federal funding (Berman 2014; Fourcade 2009; Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan 2015; Van Gunten, Martin, and Teplitskiy 2016), Figure 1 shows a persistent gap between sociology and economics that began in the 1960s and has grown.…”

“…However, the ideological effect reported in our analysis represents an important crosscurrent, because it shows that political ideology patterns perceptions of sociology but not economics. In highly contested policy arenas and public debates, societal perceptions of political neutrality or ideological diversity may afford economists a key advantage over sociology (Van Gunten et al 2016).…”

The Spatial Articulation of Urban Political Cleavages

“…"Establishment" neighborhoods tend to support the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, while "marginality" wards often reject "elite" options, although to different degrees in different elections. Unlike in Toronto, where marginality neighborhoods support populist right candidates when they emerge, London's marginality areas support parties of both the left and the right: in addition to Labour, they vote for the leftist Respect (2004 and2016) but also for the rightist BNP and UKIP. Considering component 3, which captures a division between neighborhoods with higher U.K.-born versus immigrant populations, we see that they give support to both left and right parties.…”

Paradigms and policies: the state of economics in the German-speaking countries

“…However, while the crisis of the corporatist German model has reduced the importance of institutionalized policy advice, economic experts from economic research institutes and newly funded think tanks still have a high impact on policymaking (Flickenschild and Afonso, 2018;Plehwe, 2017;P€ uhringer, 2020). Against this background, our paper addresses the political involvement of German economists on three different levels and aims to highlight paradigmatic as well as ideological power structures within politically involved economists, as recently shown for the U.S. by van Gunten et al (2016).…”