2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

This paper explores the role of public comments in U.S. federal agency rulemaking by focusing on their role in the environmental justice movement. The ways in which agencies consider environmental justice highlights how rulemaking has distributive consequences, how the public comment process creates a political community, and how concerns raised by activists are addressed, conditional upon their alignment with perceived agency missions. Examining over 10,000 rulemaking processes at 32 agencies known to address environmental justice issues and hundreds of thousands of comments on these rules, I find that when public comments raise environmental justice concerns, these concerns are more likely to be addressed in the final rule. While it cannot be inferred from these data that agencies addressing environmental justice concerns is caused by the public comments themselves, I show that public comments often mirror mass mobilization in general and that specific language raised in public comments is occasionally added to final rules. Furthermore, the correlation between mobilization and policy changes is largest and most significant in agencies with missions focused on environmental and distributional policy, precisely the kinds of agencies we may expect to be most responsive to environmental justice concerns.