Rulemaking Speed in the U.S. States

Abstract

This paper explores the speed of rulemaking in American state governments. Drawing on a unique data set of over 250,000 individual rules issued by states from 1993 through 2009, we introduce new measures of the speed and breadth of rulemaking in American state bureaucracies, providing a new way of evaluating the incidence of rulemaking delay within and across governments. We focus specifically on how professionalism and oversight powers of state legislative and executive branches affect rulemaking speed and find that states with more professionalized legislatures and governments with extensive legislative/executive oversight powers experience greater delays in rule adoption. These findings provide important new insights into the politics of regulatory delay and suggest disparate ways in which sub-national governments approach regulatory policymaking in a federal system.