Measuring lobbying success spatially

Abstract

The measurement of the political success of organized interests continues to be among the thornier tasks faced by political scientists. The methodological challenges include determining the preferences of key actors and the extent to which these are satisfied by the policy outcome. We examine how interest group success has been measured in the literature and develop an alternative, spatial approach to measuring lobbying success. We present and compare different spatial measures of success using simulations and new data from the INTEREURO project. We demonstrate that the choice of measurement has implications for the findings generated by studies of interest group success. Assessments of success differ according to whether or not they consider a reversion point. However, different modes of incorporating the reversion point lead to largely similar findings.