Duplicative or Duplicitous? The Rise of Citizen Participation in Rulemaking

• In Event: Politics of Rulemaking in the Administration State

Abstract

To what extent does a recent increase in public commenting influence the development of public policy? In tandem with this trend, we show that mentions of public comments by agency executives have increased substantially. These facts pose challenges for prior literature which suggests that citizen participation is both sparse and uninfluential. Many of these comments use duplicative language, some are also duplicitous parts of astroturfing efforts. To assess the extent of each, and the extent to which the expansion of voices affects policy, we develop text analysis tools. These allow us to evaluate: (i) the extent to which the increased volume of comments received is duplicative, (ii) which proposed rules receive them, and (iii) what the implications of such comments are on final regulations. First, we find that many comments are highly similar, i.e. duplicative, when applying our tools to a novel dataset of all comments at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since 1994. Next, we turn to an analysis of which proposed rules receive a high fraction of these duplicative comments—and characterize which types of proposed rules do. Finally, we ask whether the duplicative comments influence policymaking, potentially in duplicitous ways to the extent they reflect astroturfing efforts. We do so by examining the extent to which duplicative comments are embedded in final rules or are cited as being influential in speeches, meeting notes, public addresses, and Congressional testimony by SEC officials.

Authors

• Steven Rashin, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas, Austin

• Brian Kelleher Richter, University of Texas at Austin - McCombs School of Business