Data and methods for analyzing special interest influence in rulemaking
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Data and methods for analyzing special interest influence in rulemaking Daniel Carpenter1 · Devin Judge‑Lord2 · Brian Libgober3 · Steven Rashin1
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract The US government creates astonishingly complete records of policy creation in executive agencies. In this article, we describe the major kinds of data that have proven useful to scholars studying interest group behavior and influence in bureaucratic politics, how to obtain them, and challenges that we as users have encountered in working with these data. We discuss established databases such as regulations. gov, which contains comments on draft agency rules, and newer sources of data, such as ex-parte meeting logs, which describe the interest groups and individual lobbyists that bureaucrats are meeting face-to-face about proposed policies. One challenge is that much of these data are not machine-readable. We argue that scholars should invest in several projects to make these datasets machine-readable and to link them to each other as well as to other databases. Keywords Interest groups · Rulemaking · Lobbying · Bureaucratic politics · Data sources
Introduction If the US federal government is unquestionably good at one thing, it is pushing out paper. In theory, governmental records relevant to the creation of policy via agency rulemaking have long been available to researchers. Given its volume and quasilegislative nature, rulemaking is generally required to be more transparent than more individualized decision-making such as adjudication, enforcement, awarding grants, or making contracts. In practice, however, obtaining information on what is happening during rulemaking has been costly and challenging. In the 1990s and early * Steven Rashin [email protected] 1
Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge Street, Room 423, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
2
University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
3
Yale University, New Haven, USA
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2000s, leading research was limited to data on just a few rules (e.g., Golden 1998) or surveys (e.g., Furlong 2004). Since 1994, when the government first released the Federal Register online, data on notice-and-comment rulemaking have become increasingly detailed and now include data on draft policies, the activities of policymakers, and interest group advocacy (see Yackee 2019 for a recent review). In this article, we describe data sources that have proven useful to scholars studying interest group lobbying of federal agencies, how to obtain them, and also challenges in working with these data. Some of these data sources we discuss are machine-readable records of all agency rules published in the Federal Register, comments posted on regulations.gov, metadata about rules contained in the Unified Agenda, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reports. We also describe sources that have become more available in recent years, such as ex-parte meeting logs and individually identified personnel records of nearly all federal employees since 1973. For backg
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