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Influence and the Administrative Process: Lobbying the U.S. President's Office of Management and Budget

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2015

SIMON F. HAEDER  and
SUSAN WEBB YACKEE
SIMON F. HAEDER*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
SUSAN WEBB YACKEE*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
*
Simon F. Haeder is Doctoral Student, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 110 North Hall, 1050 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI 53706, 559.908.2704 (haeder@wisc.edu).
Susan Webb Yackee is Professor, Department of Political Science & the La Follette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1225 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706, 608.265.6017 (yackee@wisc.edu).
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Abstract

All administrative processes contain points of entry for politics, and the U.S. president's use of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review government regulations is no exception. Specifically, OMB review can open up a pathway for interest groups to lobby for policy change. We theorize that interest group lobbying can be influential during OMB review, especially when there is consensus across groups. We use a selection model to test our argument with more than 1,500 regulations written by federal agencies that were subjected to OMB review. We find that lobbying is associated with change during OMB review. We also demonstrate that, when only business groups lobby, we are more likely to see rule change; however, the same is not true for public interest groups. We supplement these results with illustrative examples suggesting that interest groups can, at times, use OMB review to influence the content of legally binding government regulations.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 109 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 507 - 522
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2015 

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