Business success rates in Congress do not by themselves demonstrate influence.

Evidence

Mark Smith examined 2,364 “business unity” issues— over a period of four decades—on which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (arguably a reasonable proxy for business groups as a whole, on this particular set of issues where most businesses agreed) took a public stand for or against. He then calculated six measures of the Chamber’s annual rate of “success” at getting the action or inaction it favored from Congress. The Chamber’s average success rate in terms of proportion of bills enacted or defeated appears to have been fairly high, but Smith did not argue that such success necessarily demonstrates influence. (A batting-average approach to influence would have to assume that standtaking is unrelated to expectations of success. Further, in order to gauge business’s independent impact and avoid spurious results, data on stands taken by other actors would need to be included as well.) Instead, Smith devoted most of his effort to analyzing the over-time correlates of high or low success, such as variations in the public “mood” and in the partisan composition of Congress. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics, 44

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explicitly defines why a batting-average/success-rate approach to measuring influence is flawed (standtaking correlated with expected success, and lacking controls for other actors).
• XREF: This is a methodological caution mirroring the difficulty of isolating any single actor’s causal influence — similar to challenges in the reader’s measurement-of-control-deficit project. — connects to: Business dominance stems from group numbers, not greater per-group influence. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:…, 124; Congruence can occur without any causal responsiveness from policymakers — Mikael Persson and Anders Sundell, Blocking the Poor: Status Quo Bias in…, 20; Correlated elite and mass preferences do not reflect citizen influence on policy. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:…, 135

Broader Connections

• Congruence can occur without any causal responsiveness from policymakers #expands (0.83) — Mikael Persson and Anders Sundell, Blocking the Poor, 20
• Correlated elite and mass preferences do not reflect citizen influence on policy. #corroborates (0.81) — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics, 135
• Business dominance stems from group numbers, not greater per-group influence. #qualifies (0.72) — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics, 124