PHYS.org: “Researchers, including Professor of Management and Organization Reuben Hurst at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, have produced VRscores, an unprecedented public database for understanding the partisan lean of different employers in the United States. Hurst, with co-authors Justin Frake (University of Michigan) and Max Kagan (Columbia University), developed VRscores over three years of data work, outlined in their working papers “VRscores: A New Measure and Dataset of Workforce Politics Using Voter Registrations” and “Political Segregation in the US Workplace.” The results “strike us that the workplace could be distinct in terms of creating an environment where Democrats can interact with Republicans in ways that would make people less affectively polarized,” says Hurst, who adds that he has always been interested in the intersection between business and politics. “People spend more time at work than at any other part of life. I think it leads to the question, ‘How do experiences at work relate to the political behaviors and attitudes outside of work?’” The dataset covers 2012 through 2024 and brings together data on 534,000 employers and 24.5 million workers by linking U.S. voter registrations to electronically available worker profiles. Hurst says one of the project’s main goals was to figure out to what extent people were exposed to people who were politically different from them at work. “There’s a lot of work in social psychology suggesting that for intergroup interactions to decrease animosity or prejudice, there must be certain conditions. Those interactions are much more likely to decrease animosity when you are working together for a shared goal but under the same leadership,” he says, noting that the workplace is one of the only places where people who have different political beliefs consistently work together with a shared goal.

• The data can be visualized and downloaded on the Politics at Work website, where the researchers break down partisan data by geographic region, industry and occupation, as well as by organizations. The data shows that some industries tend to lean more Republican, like the oil and gas industry. Hurst also notes that more pilots tend to be Republican while professors, museum curators and writers tend to have a more liberal lean. Referencing visualizations on the website, Hurst points out the field of finance leans more toward the Democratic party, “which I think is kind of surprising to people.”