PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN REGULATORY DECISION-MAKING Cases from Regulations.gov

Regulations.gov is an award-winning government Web site that has democratized the federal rulemaking process by making it easier for citizens to search, read, and comment on proposed rules. Comments citizens have submitted in relation to three proposals are analyzed. The issues in each case are classified as low salience/high complexity, high salience/high complexity, and high salience/low complexity, respectively. Qualitative analysis of the comments across cases finds that they tend to be emotional, illogical, and lacking in credibility. It is suggested that if the costs of better preparing citizens to be effective participants in the regulatory decision-making process are not acceptable, the democratization experiment might best be terminated.