Computationally Assisted Regulatory Participation

Michael A. Livermore, Vladimir Eidelman & Brian Grom*

With the increased politicization of agency rulemaking and the reduced cost of participating in the notice-and-comment rulemaking process, administrative agencies have, in recent years, found themselves deluged in a flood of public comments. In this Article, we argue that this deluge presents both challenges and opportunities, and we explore how advances in natural language processing technologies can help agencies address the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities created by the recent growth of public participation in the regulatory process. We also examine how scholars of public bureaucracies can use this important new publicly available data to better understand how agencies interact with the public. To illustrate the value of these new tools, we carry out computational text analysis of nearly three million public comments that were received by administrative agencies over the course of the Obama administration. Our findings indicate that advances in natural language processing technology show great promise for both researchers and policymakers who are interested in understanding, and improving, regulatory decision-making.

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© 2018 Michael A. Livermore, Vladimir Eidelman & Brian Grom. Individuals and nonprofit institutions may reproduce and distribute copies of this Article in any format at or below cost, for educational purposes, so long as each copy identifies the authors, provides a citation to the Notre Dame Law Review, and includes this provision in the copyright notice.

*Michael Livermore is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Vladimir Eidelman is the Vice President of Research at FiscalNote. Brian Grom is a senior principal scientist at FiscalNote. Thanks for comments from participants at a faculty workshop at the University of Virginia School of Law and the 2016 Political Economy and Public Law conference at Cornell Law School. Special thanks to Kevin Quinn and Jed Stiglitz. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of FiscalNote.