Washington Representatives Study (Organized Interests in Washington Politics) - 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, 2011 (ICPSR 35309)

Version Date: Sep 15, 2014

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Principal Investigator(s):
Kay Schlozman, Boston College; Traci Burch, Harvard University; Philip Edward Jones, Harvard University; Hye Young You, Harvard University; Sidney Verba, Harvard University; Henry E. Brady, University of California-Berkeley

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35309.v1

Version V1

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Summary

The Washington Representatives Study includes information about thousands of organizations involved in Washington D.C. politics, their organizational characteristics including the kinds of interests they represented and the nature of their membership, if any, and the activities they undertook in the pursuit of policy influence. This collection encompasses all organizations listed in the Washington Representatives directories (published by Columbia Books) for 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, and 2011 as being active in national politics by virtue of either having an office in the D.C. area, or hiring D.C.-area consultants or counsel to represent them. These organizations have been classified into 96 categories based, principally, on the kinds of interests represented. Variables include organization name, membership category, founding year, and main objective, as well as number of lobbyists hired, number of amicus briefs filed, political action committee (PAC) donations made, and web-based lobbying activities.

Citation

Schlozman, Kay, Burch, Traci, Jones, Philip Edward, You, Hye Young, Verba, Sidney, and Brady, Henry E. Washington Representatives Study (Organized Interests in Washington Politics) - 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, 2011. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2014-09-15. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35309.v1

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Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

State

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, 2011
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Sample

All organizations listed in the Washington Representatives directories (published by Columbia Books) for 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, and 2011 were included in the database.

Time Method

Cross-sectional

Universe

The data include all organizations listed in the Washington Representatives directories (published by Columbia Books) for 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, and 2011 as being active in national politics by virtue of either having an office in the D.C. area or hiring D.C.-area consultants or counsel to represent them.

Unit(s) of Observation

Organization

Data Source

Using internet and print sources, information was coded about each organization listed. The organizations' own Web sites were a principal source of information. Where relevant, information was added from opensecrets.org, as well as such government sources as the Federal Election Commission. For additional information regarding the sources of the data for this collection, please refer to the Original P.I. Documentation in the ICPSR Codebook.

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Response Rates

Information for approximately .7-2.7 percent of organizations listed in the 1991 directory were not found.

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Original Release Date

2014-09-15

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • Schlozman, Kay, Traci Burch, Philip Edward Jones, Hye Young You, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady. Washington Representatives Study (Organized Interests in Washington Politics) - 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, 2011. ICPSR35309-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2014-09-15. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35309.v1

2014-09-15 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
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Weight

The data are not weighted; however, the dataset contains six weight variables (WEIGHT, IN11WEIGHT, IN06WEIGHT, IN01WEIGHT, IN91WEIGHT, IN81WEIGHT) which users may wish to apply during analysis. An important part of the investigation was to place these political organizations into categories based on the nature of their functions, the interests represented, and, in many cases, their organizational structure. In contrast to most studies of organized interests that rely on highly aggregated categories, this study deliberately proliferated the number of categories in order to capture fine distinctions. In spite of the large number of categories, there were, inevitably, organizations that seemed to fit comfortably into more than one category. To accommodate such cases -- for example, the National Medical Association, Mothers against Drunk Driving, or the American Indian Higher Education Consortium -- the study permits an organization to be coded into as many as three categories. Thus, the NMA, a membership group of African-American physicians, was coded as both a professional association and an African-American organization. Organizations that were coded into two or three categories appear a corresponding number of times in the data. Thus, if an organization was coded as belonging to two categories, it appears twice in this data set, once for each category to which it was assigned. In order to correct for such multiple counting, it is necessary to apply weights. For additional information on weights, please refer to the Original P.I. Documentation in the ICPSR Codebook.

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Notes