Dissertation
Beyond the Status Quo: Legal Constraints and Public Influence in Agency Rulemaking (Baumgartner, Kroeger, Sahn, Kreitzer, Webb Yackee) My dissertation investigates the effectiveness of political controls over federal agency rulemaking, focusing on the notice and comment process. By introducing novel methodological approaches, including a text analysis program for isolating individual amendments, my research provides unprecedented insights into bureaucratic decision-making and interest group influence. Analyzing over 600 rulemaking dockets, encompassing more than 1 billion lines of text and 600,000 stakeholder comments, the study reveals that the direction of change between the status quo and final outcome often contrasts with the change between proposed and final rules. It demonstrates that the notice and comment process tends to preserve the status quo, constraining dramatic policy shifts, and that by the time a proposed rule is published, most critical implementation decisions are already made. Furthermore, the research finds that legal threats from interest groups, rather than information quality, play a crucial role in shaping policies during the notice and comment period. These findings challenge existing notions of agency influence and suggest that current mechanisms may enhance the policy-shaping power of privileged groups, raising important questions about democratic accountability in the rulemaking process.
Research Interests
American Politics/Methodology
Publications
Perspectives on Politics, American Criminal Law Review