Mapping Agency Ideology: How U.S. Regulators Shifted From Clinton to Trump

Why This Question Matters

Alex Acs asks how to place U.S. regulatory agencies on a common ideological scale and track their movement across presidential administrations. Understanding agency ideology matters for scholars and practitioners because it helps explain which agencies produce more or less regulation, which ones become sources of political controversy, and how evolving policy issues reshape the regulatory state.

How the Model Works

Acs develops a dynamic measurement approach based on an item response theory (IRT) framework to infer latent agency ideal points. The model treats planned regulations and presidential discretionary reviews as observable indicators that reveal agencies' underlying policy preferences. To situate agencies on a familiar political scale, the model uses presidential NOMINATE ideal points—linking agency estimates to the same ideological space used for presidents and members of Congress.

Data Sources and Design

• The analysis draws on text- and action-based indicators of planned regulations recorded in the Unified Agenda and on reviews conducted by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).
• Estimates are produced for agencies across administrations from Clinton through Trump, enabling a longitudinal view of ideological change.
• The approach is validated by comparing the new estimates to existing measures of agency ideology.

Key Findings

• The estimated agency ideal points correlate positively with established measures of agency ideology, supporting the validity of the method.
• The approach highlights particular regulators that occupy controversial or extreme positions relative to peers.
• Agency ideologies shift over time, often in response to emerging policy issues that divide the parties rather than through slow, uniform drift.
• Agencies located ideologically closer to the sitting president tend to be more productive, measured by greater regulatory output under presidential review.

Implications for Scholars and Regulators

This paper offers a transparent, replicable way to map agency preferences and to compare them directly to presidents and legislators. The dynamic estimates provide a tool for researchers studying regulatory politics, presidential control, and the partisan forces that shape rulemaking, and they help explain variation in agency output tied to ideological alignment with the president.