Susan Webb Yackee

A Bias Towards Business? Assessing Interest Group Influence on the U.S. Bureaucracy

We test the proposition that the federal bureaucracy exhibits a “bias toward business” during notice and comment rulemaking. We analyze over 30 bureaucratic rules and almost 1,700 comments over the period of 1994 to 2001. We find that business commenters, but not nonbusiness commenters, hold important influence over the content of final rules. We also demonstrate that as the proportion of business commenters increases, so too does the influence of business interests. These findings contrast with previous empirical studies and generally suggest that notice and comment procedures have not succeeded in “democratizing” the agency policymaking process to the extent sometimes suggested in the normative rulemaking literature.

Interest Group Competition on Federal Agency Rules

In the lobbying literature, the effects of competition—two or more interests lobbying on opposing sides of a policy debate—have not been assessed with regard to government agency policymaking. Consequently, neither the amount nor the effect of competitive lobbying is well understood. Using nearly 1,700 comments on 40 federal agency rules, we evaluate two questions: Do government agencies respond to lobbying by changing agency policies? and Does lobbying on one side of a policy issue beget lobbying on the opposing side? We demonstrate that agencies change the content of final rules in favor of the side that dominates the submission of comments. Thus, it seems the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” during rulemaking. We find no evidence, however, of counteractive lobbying during agency rulemaking. Our results suggest that interest groups may further their policy goals by observing more closely the actions of opposing groups during agency policymaking.

Lobbying Coalitions and Government Policy Change: An Analysis of Federal Agency Rulemaking

Coalition lobbying is one of the most frequently employed influence tactics used by interest groups today. Yet, surprisingly, the existing literature measuring its policy effects finds either no relationship or a negative association between coalition lobbying and policy change. We theorize the conditions under which coalition lobbying will influence policy and then test for its policy effects. We expect greater influence when there is consensus across the messages sent from coalitions and when coalitions are larger and mobilize new participants. Using a multilevel model, we assess the argument with survey data from lobbying entities and a content analysis of regulations promulgated by seven U.S. federal agencies. In contrast to the existing literature measuring policy effects, we find evidence that coalition participants hold important influence during regulatory policymaking. We also demonstrate that both consensus and coalition makeup are critical factors for policy change. These findings suggest that groups employing coalition lobbying—under certain conditions—can, and do, affect the content of government policy outputs.

Assessing Inter-Institutional Attention to and Influence on Government Regulations

The US federal bureaucracy implements the nations laws while juggling its own preferences and the preferences of numerous stakeholders. This article begins to unpack the conditions under which the bureaucracy responds to its stakeholders during rule making, and it is argued that bureaucratic responsiveness is conditioned on the level of attention provided by Congress and the President. This argument is tested with a dataset of forty rules and 1,444 interest group comments. Interest group influence is found to be constrained by congressional – but not presidential – attention to rule making. The results also shed light on Wilsons interest group theory of politics and suggest that the fragmentation of group preferences is less important than the central message sent by groups.

Who’s Whispering in Your Ear? The Influence of Third Parties Over State Agency Decisions

This article expands our understanding regarding the level of influence and the strategies used by third parties on the decisions and policies of state agencies. In particular, we seek to explain the ability of three actors—governors, legislators, and interest groups—to shape policy outputs in state agencies. We highlight one of the most straightforward and largely overlooked strategies for third party influence—the use of routine, informal interactions such as phone calls and face-to-face meetings. Using data from the American State Administrators Project (ASAP), we create a new, pooled cross-sectional dataset from 1978 to 1998 to examine third party influence on state agency heads. We confirm that as the interactions between state agencies and third parties increase, so too does the influence of these parties over agency policies and decisions.

Influence and the Administrative Process: Lobbying the U.S. President's Office of Management and Budget

All administrative processes contain points of entry for politics, and the U.S. presidents use of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review government regulations is no exception. Specifically, OMB review can open up a pathway for interest groups to lobby for policy change. We theorize that interest group lobbying can be influential during OMB review, especially when there is consensus across groups. We use a selection model to test our argument with more than 1,500 regulations written by federal agencies that were subjected to OMB review. We find that lobbying is associated with change during OMB review. We also demonstrate that, when only business groups lobby, we are more likely to see rule change; however, the same is not true for public interest groups. We supplement these results with illustrative examples suggesting that interest groups can, at times, use OMB review to influence the content of legally binding government regulations.

Invisible (and Visible) Lobbying The Case of State Regulatory Policymaking

Most lobbying is invisible, meaning that interest groups routinely contact government officials “off the public record.” While such lobbying is ubiquitous, whether and how it may affect public policy decision-making remains largely unknown. I theorize that lobbying that employs both invisible and visible tactics is the most influential. I study the development of 38 health-related regulatory policies in Wisconsin to assess this argument. I employ government records, survey data from more than 350 individuals, and interviews with 15 state policymakers. I find that invisible and visible lobbying—when performed in combination—are associated with greater regulatory policy change. From a normative perspective, these results are both reassuring and troubling. On one hand, the results suggest that invisible lobbying, on its own, rarely drives state regulatory policy shifts. Yet, on the other hand, those interested parties with the resources necessary to lobby across multiple modes are more likely to see policy change.

Oversight as Constraint or Catalyst? Explaining Agency Influence on State Policy Decision Making

Do agency officials hold influence over the policy decisions made by state legislators and governors? For years, scholars have asserted the important informational role that bureaucrats play within the U.S. policy-making process. However, we have only limited knowledge of the theoretical mechanisms that may allow for this influence, or ultimately, whether this influence matters to public policy outcomes. We theorize that the political oversight of the bureaucracy by elected officials not only constrains the bureaucracy but also provides a pathway for agency officials to advance their preferences by communicating their policy expertise. We assess this argument with survey data from almost 600 state agency heads, drawn from the 50 states and across all agency types. Using a multilevel model, we find that the “oversight mechanism” is a key driver of agency influence over gubernatorial policy decisions; however, it does a poor job explaining agency policy influence within state legislatures. These results suggest that oversight allows agency leaders greater success in lobbying governors than more diffuse and diverse state legislatures.

Teaching, Tasks, and Trust

nonprofits, including outreach, fundraising, and advocacy. In Chapter 6, Allard argues that despite the fragmentation of the safety net, there are common attributes across communities that result in an inefficient, inequitable, and at times, unresponsive system. These include the increased number of access points in the policy-making process, jurisdictional and program-based ‘silos’ encouraging turf battles, and inter-jurisdictional competition to attract wealthier, as opposed to poor residents. In the final chapter, Allard offers a number of policy recommendations to reduce these fractures in the safety net. Some seem more plausible than others. For example, creating financial incentives for more nonprofits to locate in high poverty neighborhoods, and collocating social services in places low-income parents frequent such as schools or shopping centers, seem much better suited to addressing the immediate problem of a spatial mismatch than policy solutions focusing on housing stability and the list of reforms he proposes to current Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) regulations. My one and only criticism is that Allard does not discuss the trend toward consolidations and mergers of nonprofits that has emerged in recent years, and how this might have played a role in his findings. This trend has been particularly prevalent among Community Development Corporations (CDCs), which are concentrated in high poverty areas and often provide job training, emergency assistance, and housing. Many view nonprofit mergers as a positive trend that not only promotes more efficient use of resources, but also strengthens capacity and improves performance. He also overlooks the fact industry norms prescribe some types of services to be brought to the client and delivered in his/her home, as with public mental health services for example. Despite these omissions, this book holds great promise for informing policy makers, foundations, advocates, and federal, state, and local government officials working in social service bureaucracies. Moreover, this book is a ‘must-read’ for scholars of federalism, social welfare policy, and metropolitan inequities as it makes a major contribution to each of these fields.

Is the Bush Bureaucracy Any Different? A Macro-Empirical Examination of Notice and Comment Rulemaking under “43”

Much has been made in the popular press of President George W. Bush’s status as the “first MBA President” (see Pfiffner 2007; Breul 2007; and see Lewis chapter two). The implication is that Bush’s two years at Harvard Business School well equipped him to transform, or to transformatively lead, an inefficient, unwieldy, and unacceptably independent federal bureaucracy. Bush himself, at a campaign stop in 2000, ridiculed then vice president Gore’s efforts to “reinvent government” as mere “reshuffling”: Today, when Americans look to Washington, they see a government that is slow to respond, to reform, ignoring changes that are taking place in the private sector and in some local and state governments. (Mitchell 2000)