Politics at Work
A research initiative and open data project to understand the role of politics in the workplace—with partisan estimates for organizations, industries, occupations, and metros.
About the Project
Politics at Work is built on VRscores, a workplace-level measure of employee partisanship constructed by linking U.S. voter registrations to electronically available profiles of workers. The data cover 24.5 million employees matched to voter registration records across more than 534,000 employers.
Unlike donation-based measures of political ideology, VRscores cover substantially more employees and organizations—and are more representative of the U.S. workforce in terms of partisanship, seniority, occupation, and industry.
The dataset is designed for researchers studying workplace politics, corporate political activity, and the intersection of business and democracy. All data are freely available for academic use.
What's Available
- Organization-level data: Partisan composition for 534K+ employers
- Industry breakdowns: NAICS coverage down to six-digit industry detail
- Occupation analysis: Partisan distribution across job categories
- Geographic data: Metro-level partisan estimates
- Time series: Annual estimates from 2012 to 2024
Collaborators
This project is a collaboration with Justin Frake (University of Michigan) and W. Reuben Hurst (University of Maryland). Supported by the University of Maryland, University of Michigan, and the University of Michigan's Year of Democracy initiative.