arXiv:2608.10329cs.CYcs.CL2026-08中稿 · as a full paper at…

分析公众意见如何影响环保署规则中的具体义务,揭示回应不均的根源。

Who Gets Heeded? An Obligation-Level Audit of Responsiveness in EPA Rulemaking

论文配图:Who Gets Heeded? An Obligation-Level Audit of Responsiveness in EPA Rulemaking
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于AI构建义务级响应审计框架,匹配评论与具体条款变更
  • 7万条评论显示意见影响力有限,支持或反对方向不决定结果
  • 组织型评论多聚焦文字修订而非实质修改,凸显能力差异

通知-评论式规则制定赋予所有利益相关方同等形式上的参与权利,但形式参与不等于实质影响规则文本的能力。现有方法多在规则或整体语料层面操作,无法捕捉评论者试图改变的具体监管义务。本文提出义务级响应审计框架,通过提取提案与最终规则中的义务内容,匹配评论所针对的义务,并分类其变化结果;每个关键组件均经盲态人工判断验证。研究覆盖2010-2022年间6,145个案件中的786,197条评论,从中选取36个核心环保署规则的70,075条评论进行分析。发现:第一,评论参与与规则修订在案卷内关联度适中;第二,支持或反对立场未能清晰区分结果,与简单偏好聚合假设不符;第三,在宽松定义下,组织性多数评论集中于编辑性修正而非实质性修改,跨案卷层面体现明显倾向。对核心结果对比的盲审验证了该结论,并揭示文本相似性方法不足以区分编辑性与实质性变化,这对测量有效性具有方法论意义。综合表明,公平性失衡的根源在于不同群体识别、解读和挑战具体法律义务的能力差异。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Notice-and-comment rulemaking gives any affected party the same formal right to influence federal regulation, but formal access is not substantive capacity to shape rule text. Existing strategies operate at the rule or aggregate-corpus level, too coarse to capture the discrete regulatory obligations where commenters seek change. We introduce obligation-level responsiveness auditing, an auditable, AI-assisted framework for measuring whether public-comment engagement co-occurs with changes to specific regulatory duties. The framework extracts proposed and final-rule obligations, matches comments to the obligations they address, and classifies proposed-final outcomes; each load-bearing component is evaluated against blind human judgment. We apply the framework to 70,075 comments across 36 EPA anchor rulemakings, drawn from a corpus of 786,197 comments across 6,145 dockets from 2010-2022. Three descriptive findings emerge. First, engagement is associated with revision at a modest within-docket magnitude. Second, support-versus-opposition direction does not clearly differentiate outcomes, an informative null inconsistent with simple preference-aggregation. Third, under a permissive reconstruction of commenter type, organizational-majority engagement concentrates in editorial-refinement rather than substantive-modification outcomes at the cross-docket level. A blind human audit of the load-bearing outcome contrast preserves this third finding under corrected labels and reveals that text-similarity methods are insufficient for distinguishing editorial from substantive regulatory change, a measurement-validity lesson we treat as a supporting methodological contribution. Together, these findings locate the equity asymmetry upstream of agency response: in differential capacity across commenter populations to identify, interpret, and contest specific legal obligations.

政策分析监管合规公众参与AI审计

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