Event

International development organizations invest millions of dollars each year into legislative participation campaigns in an effort to foster improved governance. This work has been undergirded theoretically by political scientists in the Deliberative Democracy tradition, who argue that participation in the drafting of new rules, through public comment periods, provides information about citizens’ needs and preferences to government. Governments can then use this information, they argue, to make laws and regulations that will enjoy wider societal compliance. Relatedly, studies in psychology and organizational behavior indicate that individuals are more likely to follow rules they have had the opportunity to influence. We propose that a similar dynamic between participation and compliance applies among businesses as well. In this paper, we first test this theory using survey data from an emerging economy, where we find that a firm is more likely to comply with business regulations when it has participated in the design of the regulatory framework. Importantly, however, we find evidence that this relationship only holds when the firm sees government to be attentive to its input, and that participation may actually be associated with less compliance when government is seen to be disinterested. We note that our effort to test theory in this space still faces significant issues of selection bias, and therefore discuss the design of or ongoing field experiment, where we randomize opportunities for participation by small businesses in Vietnam to a forthcoming regulation on storage of hazardous chemicals.
* CEAS Issues in Contemporary East Asia Colloquium Series