New Evidence on Citizen Voice in Development Permitting

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. administrative law was transformed in the 1960s and 1970s by judicial decisions and new statutes that gave ordinary citizens greater voice in development permitting, including rights to appear before permitting agencies and rights to challenge project approvals in courts. Researchers have found that the cost of building infrastructure, such as highways, shot up around the same time. This panel presents new evidence on the rules, practices, and and consequences of citizen voice in development permitting. One paper uses large language models to extract information about the participating public from video transcripts of city council meetings. Another paper uses text analysis to trace the emergence of citizen participation rights across 100 years of statutes. The third paper uses survey experiments to assess the causal effect of participation rights on public acceptance of wind-energy projects.

Policy Area

• Politics, Media, and the Policy Process

Secondary Policy Area

• Natural Resource, Energy, and Environmental Policy

Chair

• Christopher S Elmendorf, University of California, Davis

Discussant

• Nicholas Bagley, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

Organizer

• Christopher S Elmendorf, University of California, Davis

Individual Presentations

• The Durable Effect of Process on Fairness: Experimental Evidence from Wind Energy Siting - Presenting Author: Michael Hankinson, George Washington University

• 100 Years of Citizen Voice - Presenting Author: Leah Brooks, George Washington University

• Participation and Representation in City Council Meetings - Presenting Author: Olivia Hope Martin, Stanford University

• An Iridescent Sunset: An Empirical Analysis of Sunset Legislation - Presenting Author: Ryan Quandt, Claremont Graduate University