Public Pressure and Congressional Oversight

Evidence from Agency Rulemaking

I assess whether legislators are more likely to engage in rulemaking when advocacy groups mobilize public pressure. This involves collecting and coding thousands of comments from members of Congress on proposed rules with and without public pressure campaigns. These data also allow me to assess congressional oversight as a mediator in policy influence, i.e., the extent to which public pressure campaigns affect agency decisionmakers directly or indirectly through their effects on elected officials’ oversight behaviors.