Democracy and the Environment on the Internet: Electronic Citizen Participation in Regulatory Rulemaking

We hypothesize that recent uses of the Internet as a public-participation mechanism in the United States fail to overcome the adversarial culture that characterizes the American regulatory process. Although the Internet has the potential to facilitate deliberative processes that could result in more widespread public involvement, greater transparency in government processes, and a more satisfied citizenry, we argue that efforts to implement Internet-based public participation have overlaid existing problematic government processes without fully harnessing the transformative power of information technologies. Public comments submitted in two United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) rule-making processes—the National Organic Program’s organic standard and the Forest Service’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule—compose our data. We conclude that the Internet provides an arena for playing out three types of conflicts that have long plagued environmental decision-making processes: conflicts over trust of federal agencies, the use of science, and the role of public values

H.3.3 INFORMATION SEARCH AND RETRIEVAL

In this project, we are developing new text processing tools that help people perform advanced analysis of large collections of text commentary. This problem is increasingly faced by the United States federal government's regulation writers who formulate the rules and regulations that define the details of laws enacted by Congress. Our research focuses on text clustering, text searching using information retrieval, near-duplicate detection, opinion identification, stakeholder characterization, and extractive summarization, as well as the impact of such tools on the process of rulemaking itself. Versions of a Rule-Writer's Workbench will be built by Computer Science researchers at ISI and CMU, deployed annually for experimental use by our government partners, and evaluated by social science researchers from th

Replication data for: SES-0322662 “Democracy and E-Rulemaking: Comparing Traditional vs. Electronic Comment from a Discursive Democratic Framework"

Deliberative democratic theorists and public participation scholars have become increasingly interested in institutionalized forms of citizen discourse with the state, including those facilitated by information technology. However, there have been very few empirical studies of the claims that the Internet will make public participation more inclusive and deliberative. We report the results of an exploratory survey of 1,556 citizen participants in regulatory public comment processes in the United States. Our analysis focuses on the differences in deliberative indicators between those who submitted their comments using newly available electronic tools and those who postal mailed or faxed letters on paper. We also examine differences between those who submitted an original letter and those who submitted a version of a mass-mailed form letter. Overall, the data found modest evidence of the presence of deliberative democratic practices. More interesting are the apparently fundamental differences between citizens who submit original comments and those who submit form letters. We discuss the implications of these findings as they relate to the use of information technology to increase government-citizen deliberation. doi:10.1300/J516v04n01_0

Democracy and the Environment on the Internet: Electronic Citizen Participation in Regulatory Rulemaking

We hypothesize that recent uses of the Internet as a public-participation mechanism in the United States fail to overcome the adversarial culture that characterizes the American regulatory process. Although the Internet has the potential to facilitate deliberative processes that could result in more widespread public involvement, greater transparency in government processes, and a more satisfied citizenry, we argue that efforts to implement Internet-based public participation have overlaid existing problematic government processes without fully harnessing the transformative power of information technologies. Public comments submitted in two United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) rule-making processes—the National Organic Program’s organic standard and the Forest Service’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule—compose our data. We conclude that the Internet provides an arena for playing out three types of conflicts that have long plagued environmental decision-making processes: conflicts over trust of federal agencies, the use of science, and the role of public values

Democracy and E-Rulemaking: Web-Based Technologies, Participation, and the Potential for Deliberation

ABSTRACT. Deliberative democratic theorists and public participation scholars have become increasingly interested in institutionalized forms of citizen discourse with the state, including those facilitated by information technology. However, there have been very few empirical studies of the claims that the Internet will make public participation more inclusive and deliberative. We report the results of an exploratory survey of 1,556 citizen participants in regulatory public comment processes in the United States. Our analysis focuses on the differences in deliberative indicators between those who submitted their comments using newly available electronic tools and those who postal mailed or faxed letters on paper. We also examine differences between those who submitted an original letter and those who submitted a version of a mass-mailed form letter. Overall, the data found modest evidence of the presence of deliberative democratic practices. More interesting are the apparently fundamental differences between citizens who submit original comments and those who submit form letters. We discuss the implications of these findings as they relate to the use of information technology to increase government-citizen deliberation. doi:10.1300/J516v04n01_04 David Schlosberg is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, where he teaches political theory and environmental politics. He is also affiliated with the Environmental Science and Policy, Environmental Studies, and Grand Canyon Semester programs. Schlosberg has had recent work supporte

Progress in Language Processing Technology

In this project, we are developing new text processing tools that help people perform advanced analysis of large collections of text commentary. This problem is increasingly faced by the U.S. federal government's regulation writers who formulate the rules and regulations that define the details of laws enacted by Congress. Our research focuses on text clustering, text searching, near-duplicate detection, opinion identification, stakeholder characterization, and extractive summarization, as well as the impact of such tools on the process of rulemaking itself. Versions of a Rule-Writer's Workbench are being built by researchers at ISI and CMU, made available for experimental use by our government partners at the DOT and EPA, and evaluated by researchers at the Library and Information Science and Sociology departments at the universities of Pittsburgh and San Francisco, respectively. This project started in October 2004 and is funded for 3 years under the NSF's Digital Government Program