Project website

Primary Investigator

Email

Institution

Shulman, Stuart

Stuart.Shulman@drake.edu

Drake University

Abstract
This is a proposal for a planning grant to develop a project that will examine the impact of new communications technology on public involvement in the regulatory rule-making process. One goal of the longer-term project is to contribute to the development and deployment of more sophisticated and manageable information systems for citizen/government interaction. Both the planning phase and the larger research project will promote further collaboration between social scientists working on the democratic process of governance and federal agencies with significant information service components. Federal agencies are increasingly deploying new technologies to improve citizen/government interaction. In a statement released by the White House on December 17, 1999, the Clinton Administration reinforced the importance of upgrading the ""capacity of regulatory agencies for using the Internet to become more open, efficient, and responsive…."" Earlier efforts in the area of electronic government have created new opportunities as well as challenges associated with real-world operating constraints. For example, on December 15, 1997, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) sought public comment on proposed national standards to govern the marketing of organic agricultural products. According to the online journal GOVEXEC.COM, the USDA's National Organic Program (NOP) conducted ""the first fully electronic rule-making for a major regulation in federal history."" Following publication of the proposed rule over the Internet, the USDA received over 275,000 public comments by E-mail, WWW, fax and postal mail. This experiment in electronic government has yielded a rich database that, because of its format and size, presents novel analytical challenges. New methodologies are needed to efficiently assess and integrate citizen comments into the regulatory process. This researcher currently is collaborating with USDA staff who implemented the public comment process. Staff members have expressed a strong interest in supporting this project, and have supplied an initial data set of over 20,000 comments submitted to the NOP via Internet technology. One objective of the planning phase is to use the initial data set to test the viability of computer-based qualitative data analysis for the efficient integration of citizen comments. A second objective is to develop a design for a multi-agency project modeled on the USDA's NOP experiment. Therefore, a number of key questions will be explored in the planning phase and the resultant project that will be of interest to the academic community and federal regulatory agencies as they standardize systems for gathering and analyzing citizen input. How can the public comment process be modified to ensure the input of underrepresented groups who may not have Internet access? Will the groundbreaking NOP process shape the way the federal government uses advanced technology when managing large qualitative data sets derived from citizen/government interaction? What role can qualitative data analysis play in expediting informed analysis of patterns in public commentary and in what ways can these findings be used to affect policy decisions?