A donation-based indicator of political ideology (DIPI): An open dataset for studying the political ideologies of employees, top management teams, CEOs, boards, and industries

Abstract

Political ideologies are as salient in the workplace today as ever, and scholars have made considerable progress studying how such beliefs impact employees and organizations. But assessing the political views of those who work in organizations is a laborious task that can limit the ability of researchers to ask important questions that span firms and levels of analyses. To help address these challenges, scholars have demonstrated the effectiveness of assessing political ideology using an individual’s history of financial donations to partisan politicians and action committees. Despite the benefits of this measure, which we refer to as the “donation-based indicator of political ideology” (DIPI), its adoption has been limited due to the labor- and computationally-intensive nature of calculating it. Our study seeks to broaden access to DIPI by providing new open datasets that make political ideology scores widely available and easy to integrate for researchers studying workplace politics through many different theoretical lenses. The datasets we provide represent the culmination of combing through 107 million donation records to provide information about the political ideology of employees, top management teams, CEOs, and boards for 4,133 publicly owned firms that were featured in the S&P 1500 at any point between 1992 and 2022. We elaborate how these DIPI data can enable new and powerful scholarship on political ideology across organizational levels, partisanship within and between firms, political (in)congruence between firm actors, industry dynamics, temporal trends, and many other important questions.

Datasets located at: tiny.cc/politicalideology.