Attributes of Federal Independent Regulatory Commissioners, 1887-2000: Construction of a Multi-User Data Base

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The primary objective of this project is the assemblage of an extensive and definitive database on the personal, career, and political attributes of commissioners and board members who have been appointed to independent federal agencies since 1892. The database will include qualification and background variables, such as political party affiliation, gender, race and ethnicity, age, education, and prior and subsequent employment for the entire history of a broad collection of important federal agencies. In addition, the database will include the temporal sequence of prior and subsequent career experiences, and the timing of all relevant appointment, reappointment, and term expiration dates. This information, together with the careful documentation of seat numbers that will also be included in the dataset, will allow detailed analyses of membership change and transitions. The near-term product arising from this project will be to facilitate studies of appointment patterns to independent agencies. The longer-term objective of this project is to allow linking to voting data for commissioners, and the development of commissioner-based research on decision-making at independent agencies. The dataset is expected to document approximately 1150 distinct appointments (or 800 distinct appointees) at 15 independent agencies between 1887 and 2000.This database will be used widely by other scholars interested in this topic.