<p>I was curious if there would be any way to find out the political leaning of various college economics programs; for example the University of Chicago seems to have a more libertarian and laissez-faire outlook.</p>
<p>Well, University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Rochester and the University of Minnesota are all freshwater schools—generally more libertarian.</p>
<p>Most of the classic coastal universities (Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, UCLA, Stanford, and Yale) are saltwater—generally more Keynesian.</p>
<p>Go to department sites to look up faculty bios and research interests. If they are reasonably famous (not necessarily even Krugman level) then they may have wiki pages too. Or, to survey the whole field from the top down, try looking up Nobel and John Bates Clark prize winners for the past so many years.</p>