A simple powerful-group count proxies well for full resource-weighted interest-group indices

Evidence

In order to measure interest-group preferences and actions, we would ideally like to use an index of the sort that Baumgartner and his colleagues developed for their ninety-eight policy issues: an index assessing the total resources brought to bear by all major interest groups that took one side or the other on each of our 1,779 issues. But it is not feasible to construct such an index for all our cases; this would require roughly twenty times as much work as did the major effort made by the Baumgartner research team on their cases. Fortunately, however, Baumgartner et al. found that a simple proxy for their index—the number of reputedly “powerful” interest groups (from among groups appearing over the years in Fortune magazine’s “Power 25” lists) that favored a given policy change, minus the number that opposed it— correlated quite substantially in their cases with the full interest-group index (r50.73). — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics, 59

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose: this is the validation step showing the light proxy (Power 25 group count) approximates the exhaustive Baumgartner resource index at r=.73, grounding the operationalization that follows. — connects to: Interest-group alignment is logged difference of weighted pro versus con groups — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:…, 62; Best-shot aggregation makes large values dominate small ones by design — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 1014

Broader Connections

• Best-shot aggregation makes large values dominate small ones by design #complicates (0.72) — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 1014