Research
My work explores how corporations, interest groups, and the general public can change how public policy is implemented by the bureaucracy. (You can a website for one of my projects on who influences public policy.) Regulations change substantially before they are finalized and my work looks at the methods and mechanisms commenters use to convince agencies to change policy. These changes are not minor; for example, changes to recent regulations have exempted corporations from regulation and limited the types of financial transactions permitted by corporations. I also work on campaign finance.
Stakeholder Participation in Policymaking: Evidence from Medicare Fee Schedule Revisions (with Sanford Gordon). Journal of Politics
To what extent do the material stakes of specific policies motivate political participation by affected interests? We address this question by examining physician participation in the annual process governing revisions to Medicare fee schedules. This setting permits us to identify the relevant universe of affected actors, and to construct a novel measure of the annual financial consequences of proposed policy changes that varies idiosyncratically at the individual level. Employing text analysis to identify who participates in the notice and comment process between proposed and final rules, we find that while few providers comment, the odds of participation vary dramatically as a function of a rule’s impact, with anticipated losses motivating comments dramatically more than gains. This relationship persists in both individually tailored and mass comments, and is largely independent of the behavior of physician specialty societies. Evidence of the effect of these stakes on campaign contribution behavior is more modest.
What Public Comments During Rulemaking Do (and Why) (with Brian Libgober). American Politics Research.
Public comments on proposed federal regulations influence the content of public policy. Tactically speaking, there are two distinct reasons why comments might indeed obtain influence: they may either inform the regulator about policy consequences or they may threaten the regulator with sanction by more powerful political actors, especially the Courts or Congress. Which tactics do members of the public – especially firms and interest groups – use during commenting and why? We explore this question by manually coding public comments on Dodd-Frank rules issued by the Federal Reserve. We find that the vast majority of comments have purely informational content, while a smaller number involve threats suggesting involvement of political principals. This suggests that informing agencies is a more effective form of influence than bullying agencies, or that threatening agencies is more costly. We explore the latter alternative by measuring the size and resources of firms and interest groups that comment. We find that larger entities are as likely to prefer informing to threatening as small entities.
Data and Methods for Analyzing Special Interest Influence in Rulemaking (with Dan Carpenter, Devin Judge-Lord, and Brian Libgober). Interest Groups & Advocacy
The United States 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.
Selected Working Papers
Inequality in Administrative Democracy: Methods and Evidence from Financial Rulemaking
Research on inequality overlooks administrative policymaking, where most U.S. law is currently made, under pressure from vast flows of money, lobbying, and political mobilization. Analyzing a new database of over 260,000 comments on agency rules implementing the Dodd-Frank Act, we identify the lobbying activities of over 6,000 organizations. Leveraging measures of organizations’ wealth, participation in administrative politics, sophistication, and lobbying success, we provide the first large-scale assessment of wealth-based inequality in agency rulemaking. We find that wealthier organizations are more likely to participate in rulemaking and enjoy more success in shifting the content of federal agency rules. These patterns are not explained by membership differentials. More profit-driven organizations are also more likely to participate and enjoy more success in shifting the content of federal agency rules. Wealthier organizations’ ability to marshal legal and technical expertise appears to be a key mechanism by which wealth leads to lobbying success.
Private Influence on the Regulatory Process: Evidence From Comments on Rules
Private actors present arguments to policymakers in an attempt to influence public policy. The public nature of notice and comment rulemaking allows me to assess whether policymakers respond chiefly to the actor’s leverage or to the content of their arguments. I gather a dataset of 47,000 comments to the Securities and Exchange Commission and use a novel measure of comment “efficacy” to adjudicate between the mechanisms commenters use to influence bureaucrats. First, I show that as the amount of data and industry specific language in a comment increases, the more likely a bureaucrat is to modify a proposed rule. Second, organizational resources are not correlated with comment efficacy, a finding inconsistent with models of capture. Third, bureaucrats are more likely to incorporate commenters’ arguments into rules when the SEC chairman is a Democrat. These results are consistent with a model of verifiable information transmission and persuasion.
Incumbents are well known to enjoy a substantial fundraising advantage relative to challengers. One possible mechanism that may contribute to this regularity, but that has received scant attention in the literature, is intra-party coordination: over long stretches of the election cycle, incumbents are “the only game in town” for donors; while contested primaries create strategic uncertainty for potential contributors that may further redound to incumbents’ benefit. Both of these effects could contribute to the “financial incumbency advantage” (Fouirnaies and Hall 2014) beyond selection effects or the largesse of access-seeking donors. We implement two tests of the coordination hypothesis: first, we develop a method to decompose the financial incumbency advantage into solo, primary, and general election components. Second, we ascertain the existence of a discontinuous shift in campaign donations to candidates once the uncertainty of a contested primary resolves. Our preliminary findings are inconsistent with the coordination account: we find that the “only game in town” period does not account for a disproportionate share of the financial incumbency advantage; moreover, we find no evidence that candidates benefit in the predicted manner from the resolution of uncertainty following the conclusion of primary.