Notice-and-comment rulemaking is often held up as a hallmark of participatory democracy, and an important source of legitimacy in the administrative state. Financial notice-and-comment rulemaking is no exception. But very little is known about who comments on proposed financial regulations, how, why, and to what effect. And important normative questions remain unresolved over how financial regulatory agencies, as with other agencies, should respond to public comments, particularly form email comments received as part of “mass comment campaigns.”

The Participatory FinReg Project aims to fill this empirical, and theoretical, lacuna. The Project will collect, organize, and analyze data about public participation in financial rulemaking. The Project will apply a mix of manual and computational techniques to analyze of documents from agency rulemaking dockets. It will also conduct semi-structured interviews with agency staff and comment-submitting groups.

The findings of, and conclusions from, the Project offer to deepen our understanding of the political economy of financial regulation, and democratic participation more broadly, particularly the balance of power and influence between public and private interest groups and how this balance is being influenced by advances in digital technology.