Participatory Inequality and Rulemaking: Evidence from Financial Regulation

• In Event: Equity and Access

Abstract

In the past fifty years, both the American government's policymaking capacity and inequality increased dramatically. The growth in executive branch rulemaking has been part and parcel of these developments. To what extent, and through what mechanisms, have these developments exacerbated political and economic inequality? On the one hand, rulemaking offers ordinary citizens direct opportunities to access policymakers with policy discretion. On the other hand, the process is exceedingly legalistic, technocratic, and many people lack the time and resources necessary to argue for the alteration of a proposed policy. We explore the topic of inequality in rulemaking by documenting patterns of participatory inequality on the regulatory implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. Leveraging a novel dataset of citizen and interest group activity, we use tools of computational text analysis, event studies, and extensive human coding to show that the financial sector received systematically better access to regulators, mobilized expertise in a larger and more extensive way, and appear to have exerted greater efficacy through these efforts than the coalitions representing the broader public.

Authors

• Brian Daniel Libgober, University of California, San Diego

• Susan Webb Yackee, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Daniel P. Carpenter, Harvard University

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

• Devin Judge-Lord, Harvard University

• Jacob Waggoner, Harvard University

• Christopher Kenny, Harvard University