Citizen Participation in Rulemaking: Past, Present, and Future

Administrative law scholars and governmental reformers argue that advances in information technology will greatly expand public participation in regulatory policymaking. They claim that e-rulemaking, or the application of new technology to administrative rulemaking, promises to transform a previously insulated process into one in which ordinary citizens regularly provide input. With the federal government having implemented several e-rulemaking initiatives in recent years, we can now begin to assess whether such a transformation is in the works-or even on the horizon. This paper compares empirical observations on citizen participation in the past, before e-rulemaking, with more recent data on citizen participation after the introduction of various types of technological innovations. Contrary to prevailing predictions, empirical research shows that e-rulemaking makes little difference: citizen input remains typically sparse, notwithstanding the relative ease with which individuals can now learn about and comment on regulatory proposals. These findings indicate that the more significant barriers to citizen participation are cognitive and motivational. Even with e-rulemaking, it takes a high level of technical sophistication to understand and comment on regulatory proceedings. Moreover, even though information technology lowers the absolute cost of submitting comments to regulatory agencies, it also dramatically decreases the costs of a wide variety of entertainment and commercial activities that are much more appealing to most citizens. Given persistent opportunity costs and other barriers to citizen participation, even future e-rulemaking efforts appear unlikely to lead to a participatory revolution, but instead can be expected generally to deliver much the same level of citizen involvement in the regulatory process

Assessing Consensus: The Promise and Performance of Negotiated Rulemaking

Negotiated rulemaking appears by most accounts to have come of age. A procedure that once seemed confined to discussion among administrative law scholars has in the past decade captured the attention of policymakers throughout the nation\u27s capital. Congress officially endorsed regulatory negotiation in the Negotiated Rulemaking Act of 1990, and it permanently reauthorized the Act in 1996. Over the past few years, the executive branch has visibly supported regulatory negotiation, both through the Clinton administration\u27s National Performance Review (NPR) and through specific presidential directives to agency heads. Congress has also begun to mandate the use of negotiated rulemaking by certain agencies in the development of specific regulations. As a result of these and other efforts, federal agencies have begun to employ the consensus-based process known as negotiated rulemaking

Vertices with the Second Neighborhood Property in Eulerian Digraphs

The Second Neighborhood Conjecture states that every simple digraph has a vertex whose second out-neighborhood is at least as large as its first out-neighborhood, i.e. a vertex with the Second Neighborhood Property. A cycle intersection graph of an even graph is a new graph whose vertices are the cycles in a cycle decomposition of the original graph and whose edges represent vertex intersections of the cycles. By using a digraph variant of this concept, we prove that Eulerian digraphs which admit a simple cycle intersection graph have not only adhere to the Second Neighborhood Conjecture, but that local simplicity can, in some cases, also imply the existence of a Seymour vertex in the original digraph.Comment: This is the version accepted for publication in Opuscula Mathematic

Assessing Consensus: The Promise and Performance of Negotiated Rulemaking

Negotiated rulemaking appears by most accounts to have come of age. A procedure that once seemed confined to discussion among administrative law scholars has in the past decade captured the attention of policymakers throughout the nation\u27s capital. Congress officially endorsed regulatory negotiation in the Negotiated Rulemaking Act of 1990, and it permanently reauthorized the Act in 1996. Over the past few years, the executive branch has visibly supported regulatory negotiation, both through the Clinton administration\u27s National Performance Review (NPR) and through specific presidential directives to agency heads. Congress has also begun to mandate the use of negotiated rulemaking by certain agencies in the development of specific regulations. As a result of these and other efforts, federal agencies have begun to employ the consensus-based process known as negotiated rulemaking