drew

Even looking at the department wouldnt be granular enough, each prof has differing views and influence, and this is before you even start to measure impact on policy outcomes. For instance, a republican staff economist like @AlanMCole has lots of reach but isn't in a uni setting

Given the magnitude of the splits (let's take 15:1) a typical conservative professor would need to have 15x greater funding and 15x more citations than an average liberal professor just to make the weighted split 1:1. It's not remotely plausible.

You're moving the goalpost when you start discussing policy impact and think tanks. This discussion is about the political views in academia. I don't know of any relevant data about the funding and political split in the economics think tank world.

Matt made an observation about perceptions of economics as conservative. My point is that this perception is due to the relative influence of partisan economists on policy/the world, which is harder to measure than using a simple partisan ratio

The argument I'm making stated in a sentence is that popular perceptions of economics are rooted in the actual influence of economists on real world outcomes, a simple partisanship census of university economists doesn't capture this whatsoever

Fair enough! I believe that even the real-world impact of the economics profession is, on the net, much more liberal than conservative but admittedly there's no good data to back that up.

(It also depends on how we classify e.g. pro-immigration policies as liberal, centrist, or conservative etc.)

Yep, housing also falls into this bucket. Plenty of reliably partisan democrats in NYC where I live are extreme nimbys