Education expert Jay Greene, a colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute, has just launched his own blog, which is likely to be of wide interest. He gets off to a good start (Apr. 19) with a post based on a simple but clever idea for measuring influence:
If you stand on the steps of a state capitol building and throw a rock (with a really strong arm), the first building you can hit has a good chance of being the headquarters of the state teacher union. For interest groups, proximity to the capitol is a way of displaying power and influence. The teacher union, more than any other interest group, strives to be the closest. They want to remind everyone that among powerful interest groups, they are the most powerful – a prince among princes.
To see who has the most powerful digs, Jonathan Butcher and I actually bothered to measure just how close interest group offices are to state capitol buildings. We started with a list of the 25 most influential interest groups, as compiled by Fortune magazine. We then used Google Maps to plot the location of the state offices of those 25 interest groups and measured the distance to the capitol building.
The results are illuminating. Of the 25 most influential interest groups, the teacher union is the closest in 14 of the 50 states. The labor union, AFL-CIO, is the closest in 7 states. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and National Federation of Independent Business are the closest in 5 states, each. The trial lawyers lobby, the American Association for Justice, is the closest in 4 states.
The teacher union is among the four closest interest groups in 27 states. The trial lawyers are in the top four in 22 states, followed by the AARP in 20 states and the AFL-CIO in 19 states. …
If we gave four points for being closest, three for being the second closest, two for being third closest, and one for being the fourth closest, teacher unions would have a total of 85 points. No other group would have more than 60 points. Only four of the 25 groups would have above 40 points, with the trial lawyers, AARP, and AFL-CIO joining the teacher union in this elite group.
As Greene notes, the point of capitol proximity may be less a practical one (shaving a minute or two off the time needed to drop by to do some influencing) as that of making “a visible display of their power and influence”, like having the most sought-after seats at a sporting event. He’s followed with a state-by-state rundown of proximity here.
3 Comments
I don’t think Ted Frank would agree with this statistical analysis:
https://www.overlawyered.com/2008/04/4-of-doctors-responsible-for-5.html
This is a completely asinine study.
1) There are plenty of factors that might influence where a lobby group has its office – did this idiot control for rent, lease terms, layout, parking, accessability, other tenants? How about when a group was established – perhaps the best locations belong to the groups which have been around the longest. How about which party is more often in power in a particular state? There might be a pattern related to whether a lobby group is oppositional to the party in power or not. There might be a pattern relating to whether or not the state capitol is the largest city in the state (some groups might want offices in both, which would presumably affect how much they could pay for each one).
2) What is the difference in average distance from the legislature of the closest vs. the second, third and fourth closest? My bet would be that lobby groups tend to huddle around the legislature and the difference in proximity is minor. How about some stats showing the average distance from the legislature for various groups, rather than just ordinal status. What other activities besides lobbying does a group engage in? That could affect their choice of location.
3) Who knows, let alone is impressed by, the proximity of a lobby group’s offices to the legislature? Lobbyists visit legislators as a rule, not the other way around. If anything about a lobby group’s office was going to impress a legislator, I would expect fanciness of the office, as an indication of the resources of the organization.
4) Why would teachers’ unions be so much more interested than any other interest group in making a “visible statement of their importance”? Is the NRA or the AARP likely to be shy about advertising their importance, if proximity to the legislature is an effective advertisement?
5) How do we know that the scoring system is the best representation of the data? Maybe actual distance matters more than relative distance. Maybe being the closest is useful, but after that it doesn’t matter if you’re second or sixth. How do we know that being closest (4 points) is twice as good as being third closest (2 points) and four times as good as being fourth closest (1 point)? Note that the results would have been significantly different if the opposite scoring system had been used – i.e., 1 point for the closest group, 2 points for the second closest, etc. With that system, being closest would be twice as good as being second closest (1 point vs. 2 points), rather than closest being twice as good as third closest under the original scoring system (4 points vs. 2 points).
6) So what if teachers’ unions have (on average) offices closer to legislatures than other groups? So what if they are trying to making a visual statement of their importance? This pseudo-researcher is obviously trying to imply that teachers’ unions have nefariously acquired some unfair advantage over other lobby groups. We have NO evidence that being closest actually makes any difference in a lobby group’s influence. Even if it is an advantage, why is it an unfair advantage? What have teachers’ unions done that any other group couldn’t do? Presumably any organization which could pay the rent could have acquired the the office occupied by the teachers’ union. Granted, not all organizations are equally wealthy, but I doubt that this particular researcher is in favour of such an anti-capitalist idea as equalizing the income of lobby groups in order to equalize their influence. (I might go for that idea.) I think it’s safe to say that there are plenty of lobby groups which could manage to pay the same rent as the teachers’ union does. Perhaps lobby groups make trade-offs between paying more rent vs. spending the money on other things. In that case, every group has made a voluntary choice and has spent their money on what they value most. What is wrong with that?
I don’t see any reason to disagree with the statistical analysis qua statistical analysis; it’s quite likely Greene and Butcher correctly calculated distances using Google Maps.
I question the relevance and the likely non sequitur. As such, Turkewitz has linked the wrong post, and should have linked my Point of Law post discussing the problem of stretching trivial data to conclusions it does not support.
It would’ve been easy to perform a basic test: are states where the NFIB’s building is closer to the capitol than that of the trial lawyers states that have more tort reform passed by the legislature, and vice versa? That wouldn’t prove anything by itself (there are likely confounding factors), but it would have been a good reality check.