A Novel Measure of Federal Regulations in Ideological Space

• In Event: How the Federal Government Shapes Administrative Practices

Abstract

The absence of a comprehensive measure of rule content has greatly limited research on rulemaking. Leveraging the opinions of members of Congress expressed in formal comments on federal agencies’ proposed rules, we estimate the ideological locations of 273 important and politically contested proposed rules in DW-NOMINATE space, spanning 32 agencies over 20 years. This yields a novel measure of rule content, alongside a dataset of newly compiled comment text and rule-level data. Using our measure, we find significant variation in the policy content of rules proposed by federal agencies, beyond what is captured by prior measures of agency ideology. We also find that the policy preferences of the President, Congress, and agencies each substantially affect the content of rules, with Presidential preferences emerging as particularly consequential. Our new measure of rule content and data on Congressional responses to regulation enable further empirical study of rulemaking in several important areas, including separation of powers, distributive politics, agency discretion, and bureaucratic procedure.

Authors

• Tony Molino, University of Rochester

• Joseph Essig, University of Rochester