Research
Research
Whose voice gets heard in the regulatory process? I examine the most common method of U.S. federal policy-making: the rulemaking process, specifically focusing on the notice and comment period. Through analysis of commenter input and regulatory responses, I develop a novel natural language processing method to track rule evolution, particularly how proposed changes seek to alter the status quo. This research draws on an original dataset of over 2,000 bureaucratic rules (2017-2024), encompassing more than 300,000 regulatory provisions and 13 million public comments.
My findings challenge existing understandings of regulatory influence in three ways. First, I demonstrate that current methods misestimate rulemaking influence by conflating changing agency rationales with substantive regulatory changes. Second, I show that agencies rarely modify rules in response to comments, and when they do, changes typically revert toward the status quo rather than advancing new policy. Third, I reveal how these patterns stem from agencies’ litigation avoidance, with well-resourced commenters wielding influence through legal threats rather than informational contributions.
This project reorients our understanding of how powerful interests influence policy, shifting focus from agencies’ incorporation of new information to their desire to avoid costly litigation. The result is a system where commenter influence operates primarily as a veto power—their ability to shape policy is largely limited to blocking new regulations rather than promoting innovative solutions. These findings expose critical concerns about democratic legitimacy in the regulatory process, as stakeholders without substantial legal resources are effectively barred from meaningful policy participation. By highlighting how litigation threats, rather than informational exchange, drive regulatory outcomes, this research offers important insights into the nature of regulatory capture and raises fundamental questions about democratic accountability in the modern administrative state.
As communities throughout the country adopt Vision Zero policies designed to reduce traffic fatalities to their lowest possible numbers, they rely heavily on police for traffic enforcement. Within policing communities, however, traffic stops are seen not only as a means to encourage better driving, but also as an important tool for drug interdiction and crime control. This renders the police “distracted partners” in the fight against dangerous driving. We analyze over 230,000 stops conducted by the San Diego Police Department using geolocated traffic-stop data. We compare a model of traffic stops where they are driven by injury-causing crashes to models where the stops are associated with crime and minority population. We find that the police are attentive to crashes, but more driven by crime and minority population levels. We conclude that traffic safety efforts could more effectively be enhanced by a non-police agency devoted solely to reducing serious crashes, fatalities, and the public health threats from cars, with the police focused on crime control. The combined mission for the police of doing traffic safety and crime control results in suboptimal outcomes with regards to crash and injury prevention.
Prosecutors are very powerful players in the criminal justice system. One of the few checks on their power is their periodic obligation to stand for election. But very few prosecutor elections are contested, and even fewer are competitive. As a result, voters are not able to hold prosecutors accountable for their decisions. The problem with uncontested elections has been widely recognized, but little understood. The legal literature has lamented the lack of choice for voters, but any suggested solutions have been based on only anecdote or simple descriptive analyses of election data. Using a logistic regression analysis, this Article estimates the individual effects of a number of variables on prosecutor elections. It finds that several factors that have been previously identified as contributing to an uncontested election are not, in fact, what drives uncontested elections for prosecutors. Instead, the factors with the largest effect are whether an incumbent runs and the population of the district. It also identifies two features of state election law that contribute to the dearth of contested elections. The Article concludes by noting that these factors suggest specific policy changes that could help to increase the number of contested and competitive elections-thus ensuring that voters can help guide important criminal justice decisions in their communities.
During the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. policymakers adopted draconian criminal justice polices including widespread use of extremely long sentences, including life without parole. The country is now coming to face the consequences of these policies: a new class of geriatric prisoners posing little threat to public safety as they age into their seventies and beyond. Using a perspective drawn from bounded rationality, framing, and agenda-setting, we recount how policymakers adopted these policies, with key blind spots relating to obvious consequences of these harsh laws. We show how political leaders can over-respond to a perceived public policy crisis, particularly when powerful frames of race, fear, and dehumanization come to dominate the public discourse. We show how these trends are radically changing the demographics and needs of prison populations through a chronological review, mathematical simulation of the prison population, review of statistics about prison population, and personal stories illustrating these themes drawn from inside prison.
Public participation procedures promise to democratize policymaking, but do the procedures themselves shape policy outcomes? This paper argues that federal rulemaking's procedural mechanisms institutionalize systematic biases that privilege policy stasis over change. I use historical Code of Federal Regulations data and word embeddings to track status quo policy, agency proposals, and final rules for 2,130 U.S. federal regulations (2017-2024) at the provision level. I find post-comment changes account for minimal regulatory modification; 83% of provisions remain unchanged despite public input. When adjustments occur, they predominantly revert proposed rules toward existing frameworks rather than furthering policy change. This "elastic band effect," whereby provisions stretching furthest from existing policy face strongest reversion pressure, suggests agencies adopt defensive postures to protect rules from litigation. These findings reveal that meaningful policy formation largely precedes public comment periods, demonstrating how participatory procedures may reinforce policy stasis through procedural constraints that operate independently of participant preferences or resources.