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Mulling the Occupy Wall Street protests, political blogger Matt Yglesias poses the question, “Do ‘Large’ Corporations Have Disproportionate Political Clout?” His answer? Not really:

 I actually think it may be an analytic mistake to believe that the political system is disproportionately influenced by large businesses. To be more precise, while clearly a big business is going to have more influence than a small business, my view is that if you look at it systematically, the political system is somewhat biased in favor of small firms as a class. That’s because the U.S. political system is pretty geographically dispersed. So the sectors that have the most power are sectors that are large, but fragmented.

To bolster his case, Yglesias points to farm policy.

 Agriculture has a lot of political clout in part because rural states are overrepresented, but also in part because there are farms all over the place. New York and California aren’t “farm states” by any means, but they contain plenty of farms and farmers.

I’m not really qualified to assess Yglesias’ broader claim, though I would point out that we’ve seen the highly consolidated health-insurance and pharma lobbies essentially write the healthcare reform law. We’ve seen the highly consolidated fossil fuel-lobby twist climate legislation into a bad joke (before the legislation ingloriously collapsed). And we’ve seen a highly consolidated banking industry skulk away from the (ongoing) economic disaster it caused, minting massive profits again. In those instances, at least, size mattered.