Democratic ideals of public participation and equal voice in government extend beyond elections. Yet the role of the public in crafting policy agendas, drafting policy text, and overseeing implementation is complex. Policymaking processes include some people and ideas while excluding others in different ways at different stages. I study how organized groups and public pressure affect multiple stages of policymaking—from how advocacy campaigns frame policy debates to how congressional oversight and judicial review shape implementation. I am especially interested in climate and environmental justice campaigns. I also lead large collaborative projects examining legislator behavior, lobbying, and private environmental governance.
My work employs a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, with particular contributions in the field of text analysis. By building large open-source datasets and methods to analyze large volumes of political texts, I aim to expand the aspects of policymaking that are open to systematic study.
Public pressure and policymaking
My book project, Public Pressure, shows how civic engagement through public pressure campaigns affects policymaking, with special attention to climate and environmental justice campaigns. Its five parts address (1) why groups mobilize public pressure, (2) how public pressure affects congressional oversight, (3) how it influences policy, (4) how it reframes policy debates, and (5) how it affects judicial review. Answering these questions clarifies the role of interest group lobbying, organizing, and mobilizing in policymaking. I show that some groups enjoy advantages in policymaking based on wealth, access, and expertise. And yet, I also show that disadvantaged groups are not powerless; movements and advocacy campaigns can reframe policy debates and systematically counter business influence in politics—even in technocratic processes like agency rulemaking.
With 90 percent of U.S. law now made by federal agencies through rulemaking, understanding the politics of bureaucratic policymaking is critical to understanding our democracy. Agency rulemaking is a technocratic policy process in which participation is usually limited to a few policy insiders. Occasionally, however, public pressure campaigns make agency rules some of the most hotly contested policies of our time. Yet, leading theories of bureaucratic policymaking neither explain nor account for these fitful bursts of civic engagement. To remedy this, I develop and test theories about the roles of individuals, elected officials, organizations, and coalitions in bureaucratic policymaking. I show that pressure campaigns build movements, attract policymakers' attention, and systematically counter corporate power. At the same time, I find that the impact of pressure campaigns is contingent on the capacity of interest groups to mobilize and of policymakers to process political information. Policy moves when high-capacity groups target receptive policymakers.
First, I draw on theories about social movements and interest groups to explain why different organizations mobilize public pressure. I argue that pressure campaigns are a form of conflict expansion that advantages coalitions with broader public support, not the narrow private interests that typically dominate policymaking. I analyze millions of public comments on thousands of agency rules to develop the first systematic measures of public engagement in policymaking for 161 federal agencies. I find that most public comments are mobilized by public interest coalitions. However, because expanding the scope of conflict requires organizational capacity, campaigns are dominated by large advocacy organizations.
Second, I advance a theory of political oversight, with mass engagement in bureaucratic policymaking alerting elected officials to political risks and opportunities. I test this theory by analyzing correspondence between members of Congress and agency officials on proposed rules with and proposed rules without mass engagement. I find that public pressure campaigns are correlated with congressional attention and that coalitions with more active congressional support are more likely to achieve their policy goals.
Third, I integrate theories of outside lobbying and oversight into a broader theory of how public pressure may affect policy. I test causal mechanisms by which public pressure may influence policymakers. Using an iterative mix of hand-coding and computational text analysis methods, I measure lobbying success—the extent to which each group got their desired changes between the draft and final rule—for over 40 million commenters. I find evidence that pressure campaigns indirectly affect policy by mobilizing political oversight.
Fourth, I contribute to the literature on the effects of political movements on policy through case studies of the climate and environmental justice movements. I find that when groups raise distributive justice concerns, rules more often change to address these concerns. I show how institutions affect responsiveness. For example, agencies with an office of environmental justice are more responsive to environmental justice concerns. The scale of mobilization also matters; when larger coalitions raise concerns, policy texts are more likely to change.
Fifth, I show that rules targeted by pressure campaigns were less likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court than rules that received less public attention. This supports the theory that public attention to policy issues affects judicial decisions because Justices care about public perceptions of the Court. The book concludes with policy recommendations for increasing the capacity of government institutions in all three branches to process, vet, and learn from what I call “political information”—including public demands expressed through civic engagement and pressure campaigns. For example, because offices dedicated to issues like civil rights and environmental justice make agencies more responsive to groups raising distributive justice concerns, my work suggests that creating offices dedicated to social justice and public participation are impactful reforms.
Additional projects on agency rulemaking
In addition to my book project, I have several large collaborative projects on agency rulemaking. In a recent article in Interest Groups and Advocacy, my coauthors and I outline research agendas on bureaucratic policymaking that leverage new methods and data on interest-group lobbying. One project leverages a massive new dataset on all organizations that lobbied on financial regulation following the Dodd-Frank Act. Adding to work on inequality in American politics, we show that wealthy organizations are much more likely to participate in and influence rulemaking. We then assess mechanisms to explain the relationship between wealth and influence, finding that wealthier organizations are more influential because they engage in more sophisticated lobbying. This paper won the APSA 2021 Best Paper Award from the Public Administration section.
Another collaborative project leverages the first large-scale data on the agenda-setting politics that produce initial draft rules. These data allow us to study rulemaking across pre- and post-draft rule stages (prior quantitative studies only observe post-draft politics). We show that external shocks to bureaucratic policymaking, such as presidential transitions, have even larger effects on rules in the period between project initiation and draft publication (rules yet to be announced) than in the period between draft and final rule.
Congressional oversight and representation
My second broad research agenda examines variation in how legislators represent constituents in various interactions with the bureaucracy—from constituency service to policy oversight. Beyond my work on how pressure campaigns mobilize congressional oversight, my work on legislator behavior includes several coauthored articles, a collaborative book project, and an ongoing data collection effort. From the vantage point of detailed observation of legislator offices, our book project addresses how Congress is working, who is left behind, who is getting extra attention, and how to improve congressional representation.
Through hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and web scraping, my coauthors, research assistants, and I assembled and hand-coded over half a million letters, emails, and phone calls from members of Congress to federal agencies. These data allow new tests of theories of legislator behavior. In the first peer-reviewed publication from this project, we show that legislators who receive more campaign donations from fossil fuel companies are more likely to intervene to support those companies in regulatory issues. Another paper, currently under review, shows that legislators prioritize policy work as they gain institutional power but still provide the same levels of constituency service. A third working paper shows that legislators provide constituency service to seniors and veterans in proportion to populations in their district, but low-income constituents do not receive proportional constituency service.
Environmental governance
In addition to my main book project’s substantive focus on environmental policy, I have several collaborative projects on environmental governance. Like governmental policymaking, private actors exercise governing authority with varying levels of public participation. In an article in Organization & Environment my coauthors and I clarify debates in the private governance literature by offering new methods to measure regulatory stringency. We show how various studies arrived at opposite conclusions by focusing on different dimensions of regulatory stringency. We then compare the forest management practices required by the activist-backed Forest Stewardship Council and industry-backed Sustainable Forestry Initiative using these new methods. We find that these competing private regulations ratcheted “up” but also diverged—with the activist-backed requirements becoming increasingly more prescriptive while industry-backed requirements increased in less prescriptive ways.
Another project on the role of private actors in shaping policy assesses the role of U.S. advocacy groups in shaping Canada’s forestry regulations. In a peer-reviewed book chapter, my coauthors and I trace the policy process leading to the world’s largest conservation initiative, the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. We argue that while “Big Green” NGOs claimed credit, local First Nations groups laid the necessary groundwork.
Future research
My future research will focus on two themes arising from my current work: institutional capacity and policy feedback effects. First, major findings from several of my current projects point to the capacity of government institutions to translate public demands into policy as an understudied linchpin of democracy. For example, I am investigating why some agencies appear to have more capacity to respond to calls to address environmental justice and climate change than others. This will include audit-style field experiments randomizing the targets and content of public comments to assess how different institutions respond to different types of information (e.g., different justifications for addressing climate or environmental justice). This project will also explore how congressional offices and courts could develop the capacity to more routinely incorporate public input into decisions. My aim is to improve the infrastructure of democratic responsiveness.
A second nascent project follows from my work on how groups organize around opportunities for public participation. Following the causal chain, I am exploring how opportunities to participate in policymaking affect group formation, organization, and mobilization. Whereas most policy feedback studies trace the effects of legislation on voters, my project examines how procedural policy tools like notice and comment rulemaking mobilize and demobilize organized groups.
Methods
The methods I developed for integrating human coding of texts with computational text analysis increase the inferential power of hand coding by several orders of magnitude. Computational text analysis tools can strategically select texts for human coders, including texts that represent larger samples and outlier texts of high inferential value. Preprocessing documents can speed hand-coding by extracting key features like named entities. For example, my R package legislators helps users extract U.S. legislator names in messy text.
I show that hand-coding and text analysis tools are each more powerful when combined in an interactive workflow. Using this iterative mix of hand-coding and computational text analysis methods, a hand-coded sample of 10,894 hand-coded comments yields equally valid inferences for over 40 million comments regarding the extent to which policy changed in the direction they sought. I thus measure lobbying success—the extent to which each group got their desired changes between the draft and final policy—for millions of people and thousands of organizations. This large sample enables new analyses of the relationships between lobbying coalitions, social movements, and policy change.
In addition to making text analysis tools more accessible, my R package netlit and coauthored work with an R&R at Political Analysis make powerful network analysis tools more accessible for scholars conducting literature reviews. Understanding the gaps and connections across existing theories and findings is a perennial challenge in scientific research. Systematically reviewing scholarship is especially challenging for researchers who may lack domain expertise, including junior scholars or those exploring new substantive territory. Conversely, senior scholars may rely on longstanding assumptions and social networks that exclude new research. In both cases, ad hoc literature reviews hinder the accumulation of knowledge. Scholars are rarely systematic in selecting relevant prior work or then identifying patterns across their sample. To encourage systematic, replicable, and transparent methods for assessing literature, we propose an accessible network-based framework for reviewing scholarship. In our method, we consider a literature as a network of recurring concepts (nodes) and theorized relationships among them (edges). Network statistics and visualization allow researchers to see patterns and offer reproducible characterizations of assertions about the major themes in the existing literature.