Whither Deliberation? Mass E-Mail Campaigns and U.S. Regulatory Rulemaking

Stuart Shulman
Info Sci / Public and International Affairs, UPittsburgh

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     Last modified: May 21, 2005

Abstract
Interest groups that contract with a thriving e-advocacy sub-sector of the Washington, DC economy now routinely set up clusters of web action centers. The system generates voluminous quantities of mass e-mail comments. Meanwhile, practitioners in agencies face mounting congressional and executive demands for efficiency and effectiveness in the highly charged political and ideological environment that is a backdrop for reading and responding to the comments.

These machinations occur in part for reasons that have little to do with improving the final rule. Modern data mining and outreach techniques in the Internet-based age mean that increased membership lists and donations are at stake. These are only a few of the many reasons for the proliferation of duplicative, insubstantial electronic postcards that federal official have been known to speak dismissively of as “awareness” campaigns.

Some groups believe that overwhelming an agency like the Forest Service with form letters will result in a favorable outcome. Devotees to one or the other side in the battle over the Roadless Conservation Area rulemaking might, at this late date, wonder whether all the spilled ink and clicked send buttons have actually been efficacious in the face of mountains of litigation that keep the rule in the courts.

Our research group recently acquired (and made available to other researchers) a dataset of 536,975 public comments submitted via e-mail to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). At this early stage in the research (and in the epoch of mass e-mail campaigns) there are few indications that online deliberation is enhanced within the current eGovernment configuration in the United States. The mass e-mail campaign in particular appears to be an odd and possibly counter-productive tribute to twentieth century notions of one-directional, non-deliberative, un-reflexive nose counting.