A Female Policy Premium? Agency Context and Women’s Leadership in the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy

Although there are descriptive and substantive benefits associated with women serving in leadership posts in the bureaucracy, we ask whether there is a policy benefit associated with women’s leadership. Simply put, is there a policy premium to having women as bureaucratic leaders? We focus on agency rulemaking, a policymaking activity conducted by nearly all federal agencies. Across three presidential administrations, we find no evidence of an across-the-board premium associated with women’s leadership. However, our results are consistent with a conditional policy premium—wherein women leaders are particularly effective in advancing ambitious rules and in shepherding rules through to finalization—in agencies that have a working environment that is supportive of women and, to some extent, in agencies that focus on women’s issues. One key implication is that, rather than working to tear down “glass walls,” reformers would be better served by improving the workplace climate for women within agencies.

Procedural Fairness and the Legitimacy of Agency Rulemaking

We examine the relationship between procedural fairness and the legitimacy of rulemaking decisions made by government agencies. Evidence from a survey experiment indicates that the perceived fairness of the rulemaking process is closely tied to procedures designed to make it more transparent and to encourage greater citizen participation. However, our findings do not indicate that fair procedures bestow unconditional legitimacy on agency rulemaking actions. Rather, they suggest that the effect of procedural fairness is context-dependent and complex, with legitimacy perceptions varying across policy domains and being driven by the institutional avoidance of procedural controls rather than the procedures themselves. Thus, there may be significant limitations on the ability of fair procedures to impart legitimacy to bureaucratic policymaking.

Presence and influence in lobbying: Evidence from Dodd-Frank

Interest groups face many choices when lobbying: when, who, and how to lobby. We study interest group lobbying across two stages of regulatory policymaking: the congressional and agency rulemaking stages. We investigate how the Securities and Exchange Commission responds to interest groups at the end of these stages using a new, comprehensive lobbying dataset on the Dodd-Frank Act. Our approach examines citations in the SEC's final rules which reference and acknowledge the lobbying activities of specific interest groups. We find that more than 2,900 organizations engaged in different types of lobbying activities either during the congressional bill stage, the agency rulemaking stage, or both. Meetings with the SEC and hiring former SEC employees are strongly associated with the citation of an organization in a final rule. Comments submitted by trade associations and members of Congress are cited more in a final rule compared to other organizations. While there is more variety in the types of organizations who lobby the bureaucracy than those who lobby Congress, presence does not necessarily lead to recognition or influence.

Stakeholder Participation and Strategy in Rulemaking: A Comparative Analysis

Integrating a diversity of stakeholder voices in policymaking processes can lead to more legitimate and widely supported laws and rules. While most attention to stakeholder participation in public decision processes has focused on legislative policymaking or the role of industry stakeholders in regulatory processes, strategic choices about participation by non-industry stakeholders in rulemaking remains largely overlooked, particularly at the state level. Previous research shows that agency rulemaking processes often provide greater procedural access to industry actors, who may significantly influence final rule content by bringing greater technical knowledge to bear on rulemaking processes. Less is understood about the strategies used by non-industry stakeholders, such as environmental advocacy groups, to influence regulatory decisions. This study, which compares environmental rulemaking processes across three issues in five states, finds that industry actors and environmental advocacy groups both use a variety of participation strategies classically thought to be “insider” and “outsider” strategies, and that these choices are motivated by reasons other than the perceived effectiveness of the strategy within the formal rulemaking process.