Causes and Effects of Congressional Oversight: Evidence from Agency Rulemaking

• In Event: Class and Inequality & Legislative Politics & International Security Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Legislative Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of interest-group public pressure campaigns on congressional oversight and the role of legislators in pressure campaigns. Specifically, I focus on executive-branch policymaking. I assess whether legislators are more likely to engage in agency rulemaking when advocacy groups mobilize public pressure. This involves collecting and coding thousands of comments from Members of Congress on proposed rules with and without public pressure campaigns.

I draw on a new dataset of over 80 million public comments posted to regulations.gov, in which I identify thousands of comments from members of congress and code their policy positions. I validate this sample against a second dataset of congressional correspondence with agencies obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

These data allow, for the first time, a systematic analysis of the conditions under which legislators engage in executive-branch policymaking. For example, I identify the coalitions of interest groups on whose behalf legislators advocate and the scale of public pressure in each policy conflict. These data also allow me to assess congressional oversight as a mediator in the policy influence of interest group lobbying campaigns, i.e., the extent to which lobbying and public pressure campaigns affect agency decision-makers directly or indirectly through their effects on elected officials’ oversight behaviors.

I assess whether public pressure campaigns increase lobbying success in agency rulemaking using a mix of hand-coding and computational text analysis methods. I develop computational methods to identify lobbying coalitions and estimate their influence. These computational methods are validated against a random sample of 100 rules with a public pressure campaign and 100 rules without a public pressure campaign that I hand-code for whether each coalition got the policy outcome they sought. Comparing coalitions that do and do not recruit Members of Congress to their cause allow me to assess congressional oversight as a causal mediator in the effect of lobbying and public pressure campaigns on policy.

I find that agencies are more likely to respond to interest group demands when they mobilize Members of Congress to advocate on their behalf. While Members of Congress engage in all kinds of policies, most executive-branch rules are made with no formal comments from Members of Congress. Unsurprisingly, legislators are more likely to engage in policies with high public salience. However, the participation of legislators is more evenly split across lobbying coalitions than the participation of the broader public, which is more one-sided. When legislators do engage, they are almost always part of a broader coalition that includes interest groups that have submitted longer and more technical comments. These findings lend new and systematic support to theories that argue that congressional oversight of executive-branch policymaking is a collaborative effort between sophisticated interest groups and legislators.

Author

• Devin Judge-Lord, Harvard University