We test the proposition that the federal bureaucracy exhibits a "bias toward business" during notice and comment rulemaking. We analyze over 30 bureaucratic rules and almost 1,700 comments over the period of 1994 to 2001. We find that business commenters, but not nonbusiness commenters, hold important influence over the content of final rules. We also demonstrate that as the proportion of business commenters increases, so too does the influence of business interests. These findings contrast with previous empirical studies and generally suggest that notice and comment procedures have not succeeded in "democratizing" the agency policymaking process to the extent sometimes suggested in the normative rulemaking literature.
In the lobbying literature, the effects of competition—two or more interests lobbying on opposing sides of a policy debate—have not been assessed with regard to government agency policymaking. Consequently, neither the amount nor the effect of competitive lobbying is well understood. Using nearly 1,700 comments on 40 federal agency rules, we evaluate two questions: Do government agencies respond to lobbying by changing agency policies? and Does lobbying on one side of a policy issue beget lobbying on the opposing side? We demonstrate that agencies change the content of final rules in favor of the side that dominates the submission of comments. Thus, it seems the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” during rulemaking. We find no evidence, however, of counteractive lobbying during agency rulemaking. Our results suggest that interest groups may further their policy goals by observing more closely the actions of opposing groups during agency policymaking.
Scholars generally agree that interest groups are active and at times influential during the notice and comment period of regulatory policymaking (or ''rulemaking''). But current research often ignores the agenda setting that may take place during the pre-proposal stage of rulemaking. During proposal development, interest groups may lobby to: (1) influence the content of proposed regulations or (2) block items from the regulatory agenda altogether. This article focuses on ex parte lobbying-''off the public record'' conversations in which lobbyists share policy and political information with regulators-during the preproposal stage of rulemaking. I assess the importance of ex parte influence with data from a content analysis of government documents drawn from seven federal government agencies and a telephone survey of interested parties. Overall, the findings provide the first empirical confirmation that ''off the record'' lobbying can, and at times, does matter to regulatory content changes during a stage of the American policymaking process that is often overlooked by scholars and the public: the pre-proposal stage of agency rulemaking.
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