The political position generator—A new instrument for measuring political ties in China

•We present a new measure of political ties, the political position generator.•We find discriminant validity vis-a-vis demographics and social networks.•We find concurrent validity for political participation and political attitudes. 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.