Excerpt

The public comment process is one of the hallmarks of the American administrative state. As the informal notice-and-comment rulemaking procedure has grown into one of the most important national policymaking venues, the public comments process has become a forum for both organized interest groups and ordinary individuals to engage in public deliberation and political debate. In recent years, as both the ease of participation and interest in rulemaking have grown, there has been an explosion of public participation, and agencies now receive millions of comments from the public each year concerning proposed agency actions. These comments are voluntarily generated by individuals and organizations representing a vast diversity of interests—from large industrial trade associations representing businesses with billions of dollars at stake to individual citizens who have an interest in a particular regulatory outcome.

At the same time that agencies find themselves deluged in public comments, recent advances in machine learning and natural language processing have made powerful text analysis tools more broadly available. Both commercial enterprises and academic researchers have recently begun to put these tools to use in a variety of settings, from tracking employee morale based on email communications to testing the relationship between online blogging and political opinions. Computational text analysis of public comments, however, is relatively rare, leaving largely untapped a substantial resource for both scholars and policymakers.

Public comments are a valuable source of data that can be used to empirically examine how bureaucratic institutions interact with the public. As a form of political participation that is unique to the bureaucratic setting, commenting behavior is an interesting and important phenomenon in its own right and provides information on how agencies and their actions shape and are shaped by the publicly expressed views of individuals and groups. In recent years, a small number of political scientists and others interested in bureaucratic behavior have begun to take advantage of public comments to study agencies—work that can be substantially facilitated by leveraging new tools in computational text analysis.

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