Policymaking Venues Research Articles

Presidential Transitions and Interests Group Participation in the Notice and Comment Process

Federal administrative agencies are one of the primary policymaking venues in the United States. One of the core features of U.S. administrative practice is the notice-and-comment process in which agencies solicit, collect, and respond to comments from the public before issuing new regulations. In this paper, we develop a model of commenting based on three motivations—litigation preservation; agency persuasion; and expression—and analyze public comments to determine how features of the political environment, and specifically the president in power, affect the pool of commenters. We focus on the 2017 presidential transition, when there was both a change in Presidents and the party in control of the White House. We find that there were greater differences in the pool of commenters between administrations than within administrations and that interest groups tended to participate more when they were more closely associated with the party in power. Our findings support the view that many commenters use the public comment process for persuasive purposes, and not only to preserve litigation opportunities or for purely expressive reasons.

Did the Far Right Breed a New Variety of Foreign Policy? The Case of Bolsonaro's “More-Bark-Than-Bite” Brazil

Abstract Far-right populist leaders often take office promising a revolution in policies. They project themselves as counterpoints to other political competitors and defend radical positions regarding a set of issues. These contents may include nationalistic–chauvinistic measures, antienvironmental attitudes, conservative postures toward human rights, and religious leaning. According to our framework, though, leaders will only be able to pursue sharp foreign policy changes in pluralistic societies if, first, they win internal disputes at policymaking venues. Second, some policies will depend on external support or, at least, the non-imposition of unsurmountable obstacles. An acute foreign policy change may occur if such “battles” are won—home and abroad. Otherwise, a few incremental and superficial shifts are the maximum outcomes these leaders can get. A within-case study on Bolsonaro's Brazil provides useful evidence for our argument.

Red wolf science and identity storylines in an online discursive community

Predator restoration is ecologically important but politically controversial. Red wolf (Canis rufus) reintroduction is challenged by public criticism and scientific uncertainty. Red wolf taxonomy is a core issue, as researchers debate wolves’ identity and political stakeholders work to interpret technical issues and promote their favored political storylines. Red wolf reintroduction critics form a politically important discursive community. We analyzed these critics’ discourse, identifying storylines characterizing science, scientists, and red wolf identity. Our corpus was an influential internet thread, active since 2013. We found that red wolf restoration opponents accepted the authority of science, and felt that science supported their perspective. They believed peer reviewed science to be more legitimate than applied or management science, that science supported their belief that red wolves were not a real species, and that red wolves’ status as a species was an anti-scientific conspiracy. Red wolf restoration advocates on the thread countered these arguments while similarly believing in scientific authority. Restoration opponents constantly sought to promote their storylines in policy-making venues, and found the red wolf restoration program to be corrupt and the reintroduced canids themselves to be impure. These storylines parallel similar findings elsewhere, highlighting the political challenges faced by predator restoration science and policy, the issues of purity complicating many levels of the discourse, and the role of online venues as effective spaces to create and promote discursive communities and their storylines

Portraying the Structure and Evolution of Polycentricity via Policymaking Venues

This paper portrays a polycentric governance system by exploring the evolution of its structure and the interdependencies of its policymaking venues. It utilizes a semi-automated approach developed from the institutional grammar to analyze four policymaking venues by their 55 public policies adopted from 2007 through 2019 in the context of oil and gas development in Colorado, USA. The results show that this governance system continuously evolves through the adoption of public policies, which modifies its constellation of actors, issues, rules, and deontics (i.e., imperatives). In analyzing the content of these policies, we show how the four policymaking venues display interdependencies as well as distinct emphases. The conclusion summarizes the contributions and raises challenges for advancing knowledge about polycentricity.

Where's the Spam? Interest Groups and Mass Comment Campaigns in Agency Rulemaking

This article examines the sponsorship and content of mass comment campaigns in administrative rulemaking in the United States. Mass comment campaigns consist of identical and near‐duplicate comments sponsored by organizations and submitted by group members and supporters to government agencies in response to proposed rules. Drawing from research on interest group lobbying, it is posited that organizations of all types sponsor mass comment campaigns, but that campaigns submitted by regulated entities (i.e., industries) are more substantive than campaigns generated by beneficiaries of stringent regulations (e.g., environmental advocacy groups). These expectations are confirmed in the context of more than one thousand mass comment campaigns that occurred during Environmental Protection Agency rulemakings between 2012 and 2016. The analysis primarily focuses on data collected about the identity of organizations that sponsor mass comment campaigns and the content (i.e., length and complexity) of campaigns, and is supplemented by interviews conducted with organizations that sponsor campaigns. The findings suggest that mass comment campaigns are not a phenomenon meriting unique explanation, but rather occur in a manner similar to lobbying in other policymaking venues, such as lawmaking in Congress.

More equal than others: Assessing economic and citizen groups' access across policymaking venues

This study assesses whether economic interest groups (business associations and trade unions) enjoy better access to the policymaking process than citizen groups. It compares the interest group population in Switzerland with those sets of groups present in the administrative and legislative venues. The study devises an aggregate measure of access to policymaking as a whole, which weights access according to different venues' importance. It theorizes the granting of access as a sequential process. Policymakers first decide whether to grant any access at all (selection stage) and then decide on the amount of access (allocation stage). Empirical evidence shows that policymakers do not discriminate between economic and citizen groups at the selection stage, but that they subsequently grant more access to economic groups. These findings qualify existing research, which interprets economic groups' superior access as the resilience of neo‐corporatism, while also questioning the pluralizing effect of multiple policymaking venues.

Overlapping authorities in U.S. energy policy

Overlapping intergovernmental authorities explain much of the complexities in U.S. energy policy, by accounting for limited powers, uncertain autonomy, cooperation and conflict, inter-state differences, and intersecting policies. Among the implications of overlapping authority are polycentric policymaking venues, direct and indirect policy effects, and energy system governance. Overlapping authority provides a framework for understanding the intersecting roles of national, state, and local governments in energy policy.

Linking Diversity of Collaborative Policymaking Venues With Procedural Justice Perceptions: A Study of U.S. Marine Aquaculture Partnerships

Diversity has long been recognized as a critical component of collaborative governance. Among many rationales, the representation of diverse perspectives and participants in collaborative governance arrangements is expected to facilitate holistic understandings of complex public policy and management issues while promoting principles of democracy and inclusion. Such outcomes, however, are typically only achievable if the process of collaboration similarly engenders these principles. In this article, we investigate the dynamic relationship between diversity and perceived procedural justice in the context of 10 collaborative policymaking groups involved in guiding U.S. marine aquaculture policy development. Among our key findings is that certain types of participant diversity (i.e., affiliation and intergovernmental diversity) and diversity in beliefs about science and local knowledge are significantly associated with perceptions of procedural justice among participants within the collaborative groups. We also find that the relationship between participant diversity and perceived procedural justice is curvilinear; the positive effect of diversity is highest when the level of diversity is moderate (an inverted U-shaped pattern). We conclude our article with practical implications and suggestions for future research on procedural justice within collaborative partnerships.

Brussels Bound

Parties in list systems must select candidates to best accomplish their electoral, organizational, and policy goals. In particular, parties must balance nominees’ policy-making potential against other aspects of candidate quality, such as electoral viability. We exploit the unique variation in candidates and parties in European elections to study this trade-off. We develop a statistical ranking model to examine how parties facing varying strategic contexts construct electoral lists and apply it to a novel data set chronicling the political backgrounds of candidates in the 2009 European parliamentary elections. Parties that place high salience on the target legislature, are well positioned to influence policy once in office, and have less access to competing policy-making venues place particular emphasis on institution-specific policy-making experience relative to other types of candidate experience. This systematic variation in parties’ candidate nomination strategies may fundamentally alter legislative output and partisan policy influence.

The adaptive venue shopping framework: how emergent groups choose environmental policymaking venues

Scholars have succeeded in producing several explanations for why groups choose to pursue their policymaking goals in different venues. A synthetic framework that explains the choices these groups make is developed through two case studies describing a conflict over the environmental problem of agricultural field burning. Emergent, boundedly rational groups with a mission to clear the air of the pollutants associated with field burning are found to be choosing venues by strategically assessing the institutional context. The particular institutional context that matters involves three primary elements: the group’s mix of resources, opponents’ resource strengths, and the degree of venue accessibility. These initial choices allow groups to generate new resources, to learn about which strategies do and do not work, and to change venues on the basis of their new resources and what they have learned.

No place like home? Explaining venue selection of regional offices in Brussels

ABSTRACTWhile subnational authorities strongly mobilize in Brussels, they do not lobby all EU-level venues to the same extent. This article explains the varying intensity with which regional offices interact with various EU-level policy-making venues when seeking to influence EU policies. Theoretically, we complement an exchange-based perspective with political-institutional and contextual factors, such as regional political autonomy and the degree of preference alignment with key policy-making venues. To test our hypotheses, we rely on evidence collected through 33 face-to-face interviews with regional representations concerning their lobbying activities in four salient policy processes. Our results highlight that while most offices regularly interact with both national and supranational venues, the central government representation in Brussels is always, irrespective of what is at stake, the most important contact point. Furthermore, we also find that policy alignments shape venue selection, indicating some evidence of strategic manoeuvring.

What is Environmental Justice?

This posting outlines the concept of as I recently described it for an encyclopedia entry in the field of Action Research. In this discipline, the term describes more than a outcome. It is a social movement, and a theoretical lens, that is focused on fairness in the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, and in the processes that determine those distributions. In both cases, an attention to environmental justice means amplifying the voices of poor, racialized and Indigenous communities in environmental and natural resource policy-making venues -- places that have typically produced decisions resulting in those communities bearing more than their fair share of environmental harms. It also means, increasingly, paying attention to the manner through which disadvantaged and historically oppressed peoples within those communities will often be disproportionately harmed, often along familiar social gradients of gender, class, sexuality, caste, and (dis)ability. Effective research in the environmental justice framework has tended to involve robust partnerships between local communities, organizations and/or groups of activists seeking to achieve environmental justice, and university-based researchers employing participatory-action methodologies. These collaborative efforts have proven to be very fruitful in many cases, but should not be understood as easy or straightforward to implement. New models are emerging that seek to combine and enhance the expertise, capacities and perspectives of the partners in order to meet primarily, the needs of communities, and secondarily, the aims of researchers.

The Costs and Benefits of American Policy-Making Venues

Many law and policy scholars consider judges inimical to good public policymaking, and the criticisms they level on the judiciary implicitly reflect some of the concerns raised by Alexander Bickel and other critics. Despite the charge by critics that judges are institutionally ill equipped to participate in the policy-making process and that legal processes are costly, there are reasons to believe otherwise. This article uses field interviews and three case studies of an environmental dispute in the Pacific Northwest to show that the judiciary can be an institutional venue that enhances public input, can be more inclusive than other venues, and produces positive-sum outcomes when other venues cannot. The findings also suggest that legislative and agency policymaking are just as contentious and costly as judicial policy-making processes.

Advancing Evidence-Based Practices for Juvenile Justice Reform Through Community Development

There is a general agreement in the literature concerning what works and what does not work in reducing delinquent behavior with juvenile offenders in communities; however, this knowledge has had limited penetration into general public, political, and policymaking venues, as it is reported that less than 10% of juvenile offenders are afforded evidence-based community services. This article describes how Louisiana, through a combination of state, local, university, and national partnerships, adopted a community development model that has led to a 27% increase in juvenile-justice-involved youth having access to evidence-based services while the state witnessed a simultaneous 46% drop in juvenile arrests between 2006 and 2010.

Business as usual: interest group access and representation across policy-making venues

AbstractWe provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. Firstly, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Secondly, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proportion of groups also lobby the bureaucracy. Thirdly, representational biases in legislative lobbying are replicated across venues: business groups dominate administrative lobbying at least as much as they do legislative lobbying. Finally, the level of interest group activity in one venue for a given policy area is strongly related to its level in the other venue. The findings potentially have important implications for the impact of institutional design on both the form and promotion of broad participation in policy-making as well as the ultimate content of policies chosen by democratic governments, broadly construed.

Politicians, Interest Groups, and Regulators: A Multiple-Principals Agency Theory of Regulation, or "Let Them Be Bribed"

Politicians, Interest Groups, and Regulators: A Multiple-Principals Agency Theory of Regulation, or "Let Them Be Bribed"

The Independent Judiciary in an Interest-Group Perspective

The Independent Judiciary in an Interest-Group Perspective