[dragonwriter]

> IIRC, if the public unanimously supports a particular initiative, it has only a 30% chance of making it into law, and it's more than double that if corporations support it.

That's obviously not a set of statistics that is possible to directly observe; such a conclusion is only possible through a model dependent on extrapolation which assumes that a relationship holds outside the observable range. (And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.)

[throwaway894345]

> That's obviously not a set of statistics that is possible to directly observe; such a conclusion is only possible through a model dependent on extrapolation which assumes that a relationship holds outside the observable range.

It sounds like you're airing a general grievance against sampling, but I'm sure that's not what you mean, so please elaborate?

> And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.

I don't see how that renders anything 'incoherent'. Are you interpreting "unanimous public support" to mean "literally every single citizen supports this policy, including corporate decision-makers and legislators"? Such pedantry aside, it's entirely possible for an overwhelming majority of the public to want a particular policy decision irrespective of whether "corporate decision-makers" or legislators find themselves in the majority or minority.

In whatever case, the statistic I'm thinking of is from former labor secretary Robert Reich's "Inequality for All" documentary. I don't care to skim it for exact phrasing or numbers. Similar information can be found here: https://represent.us/action/no-the-problem/.

[dragonwriter]

> It sounds like you're airing a general grievance against sampling, but I'm sure that's not what you mean, so please elaborate?

You obviously aren't going to have any measure that actually has 100% popular support. So the only way you could get to “if it has unanimity among the public, it has only a 30% chance of passing” based on anything even approximating empirical science is to take some observations about success at various less than unanimous levels, and develop a model of the relationship between public support and chance of passage, and use that model to extrapolate beyond the high endpoint of support from the data. Without a strong theoretical rationale which you have good reason other than the observed relationship within the tested range to believe is the explanation for the tested phenomenon, it is always suspect to extrapolate an empirical relationship outside of the range in which it has been observed.

> Similar information can be found here: > https://represent.us/action/no-the-problem/.

The study linked to support that is interesting, but since it models the effect of interest groups, including mass interest groups, separately from both public and elite individual preferences, and finds that both elite preferences and interest group alignment have significant independent impacts, but average citizen preferences don't have a strong separate effect, what it really indicates is that average citizens are effective in politics only to the extent that their preferences energize action through organized groups.