Dr. Bill West, who holds the Sara Lindsay Chair at the Bush School, is part of a team recently awarded a grant to study how interest groups participate in and influence the federal rulemaking process. Professor Wendy Wagner of the UT School of Law is the principal investigator on the $45,000 grant, which was awarded by the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences Program.
The focus of the study is how related businesses ‘own’ the rulemaking process due to their ability to invest in information about complex policy issues that affect their operations, and then provide that information to those promulgating the rules. The data to be captured and analyzed will provide a new angle on why regulation does not work as it should, and how public interest groups may or may not intervene successfully in the regulatory process.
