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Automated estimates of state interest group lobbying populations

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Abstract

A number of strides have been taken in recent years to measure interest group populations in the American states, but sorting these groups by economic sector requires substantial investment in time and personnel. This paper introduces an automated process to estimate the industry of interest groups, using only their names. We discuss the advantages and hurdles of using automated methods and then employ a supervised learning method that produces a reliable set of estimations of the sector of more than six hundred thousand interest groups in the states. We validate these estimates in a number of ways, showing that they closely correlate to datasets employed in the literature, can replicate published results and reflect real-world events.

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Notes

  1. Gray and Lowery also coordinated a team that hand-coded the 2007 version of the NIMSP data according to their coding scheme.

  2. Unsupervised methods, such as the one employed by Hopkins (2018), do not require training data and are better suited to produce their own categories, which can be useful in exploratory work and reveal categorizations to researchers when they did not know what to expect.

  3. A useful explanation of ‘Naïve Bayes,’ with equations, is available from the software engineer Ahmet Taspinar on the Data Science Central blog http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/text-classification-sentiment-analysis-tutorial-blog (accessed: January 11, 2016).

  4. We estimate six sets of bags of words: two using just the hand-coded estimates (one with all words and one with stop words removed), two using just the lobbying reports from Colorado and Pennsylvania (with and without stop words) and two with both (with and without stop words). We also evaluate three different equations to combine individual word probabilities from step 4 and two different types of bootstraps drawn 50 times each, as described in step 6.

  5. See the Online Appendix: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/WLYBSX/VSH8ZR&version=2.0.

  6. We use a stop list of 1557 words and misspellings that remove geographic identifiers, suffixes (e.g., Inc.), basic words (e.g., Services), numbers (1,2,3,...,11811061), locations (akron, alabama, alaskan, etc.), common groupings (association, associates, board, corporation, league, services, etc.), solo letters (f, j, k, etc.), suffixes (junior, llc, inc, corp, etc.) and geographical fixtures (mountain, ocean, riverside, etc.). This list of words is available in Tables 15–18 in Online Appendix.

  7. Specifically, these samples are drawn using STATA’s gsample feature, with analytic weights for \({B_{{\rm s}}}^2\).

  8. Table 14 in Online Appendix shows that the levels of recall and precision scores are lower with the Massachusetts data. This is due to the fact that only 17 of the 26 Gray and Lowery policy codes overlap with Massachusetts’ scheme.

  9. We draw estimates of the number of bills introduced in each policy area using code word searches from LexisNexis (Garlick 2020). This is the same procedure used by Lowery et al. (2004).

  10. Hartman, Kristi. (2014) ‘Lessons from North Dakota’s Energy Boom’ 8 Oct http://www.ncsl.org/blog/2014/10/08/lessons-from-north-dakotas-energy-boom.aspx.

  11. Available from the Correlates of State Policy project: http://ippsr.msu.edu/public-policy/correlates-state-policy (accessed 24 Sept 2019).

  12. See Thomas Holyoke’s personal Web site: http://www.fresnostate.edu/socialsciences/polisci/fac-staff/full-time/holyoke.html (accessed 24 Sept 2019).

  13. There are three individual datasets available; the first provides each individual group estimate: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/AW4DY7. The second dataset has the aggregate measure for each year from 2006 to 2017. The third dataset has the aggregate measure for two-year periods from 2006 to 2017. The aggregate datasets are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/WLYBSX.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA

    Alex Garlick

  2. University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA

    John Cluverius

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  1. Alex Garlick
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  2. John Cluverius
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Correspondence to Alex Garlick.

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We thank anonymous reviewers and participants at the 2017 State Politics and Policy Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, for helpful comments, as well as Virginia Gray and David Lowery for sharing data. Supplementary materials and the data described in this article are available for download at the Harvard Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/garlick_auto.

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Garlick, A., Cluverius, J. Automated estimates of state interest group lobbying populations. Int Groups Adv 9, 396–409 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-020-00091-z

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