Discussion Leader: Cary Coglianese
Summary:

The “research community”
• Any number of communities with varying inputs
• Researchers
     o Legal scholarship community, political science community, information sciences, social sciences (criminologists), economists, political theorists, game theorists, system analysts, business scholars
Short term vs. Long Term
Questions in research
• How does the public accept information from the government and how do they want to communicate?
• What does the customer want?
• How does the public want to communicate with Congress?
• Should e-rulemaking educate?
     o E-rulemaking is supposed to make the bureaucracy more accessible
     o The public typically thinks of the bureaucracy negatively
Impacts of E-rulemaking
• Visibility of government
• Participation impacts
• Internal control impacts
     o Relationship between the Executive Branch and Congress
• Model impacts
     o Expert, plebiscite, deliberative
E-Docket
• Comments are also helpful in understanding communication
• How do e-dockets affect information transmission?
     o Across agency offices
     o Across other regulatory actors
     o Across compliers
     o Compare e-dockets with conventional rules
• Differences across comments
     o Do they change with e-rulemaking?
     o How do they change?
How do we get from plebiscite to deliberation?
• Educate people about the process
• Help create effective comments
• Need to participate in various phases
How does e-rulemaking affect grassroots, beltway lobbying?
What does e-rulemaking say about e-government?
• If it doesn’t work here, e-government doesn’t exist
     o E-governance/e-governing
How does e-rulemaking shift political power?
• Who gets power (institutional)
     o President
     o Congress
     o Agencies
Considerable research on e-governance
• Example: Impact of e-government cross-nationally on transparency research on e-rulemaking
• At the end of the commenting period it is incomplete
      o Only the “usual suspects”
     o How do we reach others?
Diversion of time-sensitivity
• Public needs should be a top priority
• How to find information
     o Data mining tools
How do e-rulemakers do their jobs?
• Understanding the process
     o How do they make their decisions?
     o How do they inform of their decisions?
Research that can be done in a transitional situation
• Example: reply to comments
2 Different Groups
• Rulemakers and users (public and interest groups)
How can e-rulemaking be modified to facilitate research?
• Example: Make it easier to obtain information in a certain time frame
• Still in construction mode of the system
     o Is it possible to put in features for research?
     o Should we?
What can practitioners do to help researchers?
• Should they help?
     o Not necessarily because it can pose as a burden for practitioners
     o They should still be flexible though
The “public” is not well defined
• Who are they?
• What are their characteristics?
• Who is e-rulemaking for?
Should there be filters for non-citizens logging on?
• Exporting aggregate data
• Flagging data

Discussion Leaders: Stuart Shulman, Jeffrey Lubbers
Summary:

Research questions to answer in a future conference:
• Can we build into the rule-making process devices that facilitate research?
• How can we make sure that commenters present information about themselves?
• Solicit a study that investigates whether there is a correlation between the way in which commenters comment (public identity vs. commenting anonymously) and the quality of the comment. Do people comment differently when they do so anonymously then when they identify themselves? Are comments where people identify themselves more thoughtful than those comments where commenters don’t identify themselves?
• What is an operational measure of better rule-making?
• Introduce a comparative perspective: What measures have been taken in the European Union and in European nation-states in terms of e-rulemaking and using the Internet to increase the transparency of the rulemaking process? The United Kingdom is ahead of the United States in terms of e-rulemaking. Germany, on the other hand, probably falls far behind the U.S., as the German government dislikes transparency.
• How do the requirements of homeland security impinge on the process of electronic rulemaking?
• Develop a typology of rules before conducting a meta-analysis, like Wilson’s typology of agencies. That would be helpful for agencies.