Out of the public’s eye? Lobbying the President’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Abstract

We introduce readers to an advocacy tactic that is largely unknown to scholars: lobbying the U.S. President’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). We first present an overview of lobbying during U.S. regulatory policymaking, including during OIRA’s review of proposed government regulations. Second, we introduce readers to a data source that allows scholars to track lobbying during OIRA’s regulatory review, and we provide several descriptive statistics from a lobbying dataset that covers January 2005 to June 2011. Third, we highlight different applications of these data, including our efforts to integrate the data with other information sources. We close by encouraging interest groups scholars to take advantage of these largely untapped data, which are more accessible today than even a few years ago and to connect these data with other available sources both inside and outside of the regulatory process.