TY - JOUR A1 - Stockmann, Daniela A1 - Hartman, Keri A1 - Luo, Ting T1 - The political position generator - A new instrument for measuring political ties in China JF - Social Networks N2 - This paper proposes a novel instrument – the political position generator - for measuring individuals’ political ties, or personal, affective connections to state officials and other political actors. It adopts and adapts the more general position generator framework in social capital research to capture three key dimensions of political ties – upper reachability, network diversity, and tie strength. The measure is validated with data from a representative survey of the Chinese population and three scales representing the three political ties dimensions are created. In correlational and multivariate regression analyses, we find initial evidence of the instrument’s criterion-related (discriminant and concurrent) validity. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2020.05.004 SN - 0378-8733 VL - 63 SP - 70 EP - 79 ER -