Institutional Design and Civic Access: Evidence from Bureaucratic Rulemaking

Dwidar will investigate the practice of federal agency interventions to facilitate greater participation by advocates for socially and economically marginalized communities in American rulemaking, using the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Office of Public Participation (OPP) as a case. Do these interventions successfully promote greater civic access among public participants representing socially and economically marginalized constituencies in agency rulemaking? How are participants' advocacy behaviors shaped by this access? What are these consequences of these interventions for the outcomes of participants' advocacy? The project will make important theoretical and practical contributions by using a causal inference strategy that combines regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences designs to estimate the overall and participant-level effects of OPP's interventions. The particularities of this case and research design will enable Dwidar to draw conclusions about the outcomes of OPP's programs and offer concrete prescriptions for policymakers and government offices seeking to leverage institutional design choices to facilitate greater civic access for underrepresented communities in American politics. In doing so, this work will offer formative contributions to interdisciplinary research on political inequality and representation, political advocacy, institutional design, public administration, and administrative law.