California Journal of Politics and Policy

In this manuscript, we introduce a new measure of political influence in California. Leveraging a new dataset of candidate rankings of their own endorsements, we use the Bradley-Terry model to estimate influence for a broad array of officeholders, interest groups, and endorsing organizations who participate in California politics. We call this new measure of influence Clout scores. Our measure of a person’s clout is based on how much candidates for office desire that individual’s endorsement. Specifically, we measure a political actor’s clout by estimating the extent to which that actor’s endorsement is preferred to a baseline endorsement group. Our estimates provide an original, empirically-grounded portrait of the distribution of political capital in California and highlight which political elites have the greatest capacity to swing election outcomes.