Ana S. Cardenal

@ascardenal.bsky.social

Political Scientist. Professor at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

Really happy to see this piece finally out in @poqjournal.bsky.social. We exploit an unexpected global news event to test exogenous measures of exposure varying in granularity. The results have implications for studies using webtracking data, particularly domain-level measures of news exposure #CSS

Public Opinion Quarterly - POQ@poqjournal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Not all news clicks teach us something. In POQ, Cardenal et al., using digital trace data, find that only article-level exposure to Ukraine stories—not general news browsing—predicted who learned about the Russian invasion. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

The DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning. 🧵⬇️

Scatterplot titled “Empirical Evidence of Ideological Targeting in Federal Layoffs: Agencies seen as liberal are significantly more likely to face DOGE layoffs.”
	•	The x-axis represents Perceived Ideological Leaning of federal agencies, ranging from -2 (Most Liberal) to +2 (Most Conservative), based on survey responses from over 1,500 federal executives.
	•	The y-axis shows Agency Size (Number of Staff) on a logarithmic scale from 1,000 to 1,000,000.

Each point represents a federal agency:
	•	Red dots indicate agencies that experienced DOGE layoffs.
	•	Gray dots indicate agencies with no layoffs.

Key Observations:
	•	Liberal-leaning agencies (left side of the plot) are disproportionately represented among red dots, indicating higher layoff rates.
	•	Notable targeted agencies include:
	•	HHS (Health & Human Services)
	•	EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)
	•	NIH (National Institutes of Health)
	•	CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau)
	•	Dept. of Education
	•	USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development)
	•	The National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE), despite its conservative leaning (+1 on the scale), is an exception among targeted agencies.
	•	A notable outlier: the Department of Veterans Affairs (moderately conservative) also faced layoffs despite its size.

Takeaway:

The figure visually demonstrates that DOGE layoffs disproportionately targeted liberal-leaning agencies, supporting claims of ideological bias. The pattern reveals that layoffs were not driven by agency size or budget alone but were strongly associated with perceived ideology.

Source: Richardson, Clinton, & Lewis (2018). Elite Perceptions of Agency Ideology and Workforce Skill. The Journal of Politics, 80(1).