Unveiling the interaction between regulatory agencies and the society: Anatel and Anvisa notice-and-comment processes
regulatory agencies, rulemaking, democratic deficit, notice-and-comment, natural language processing
Regulatory agencies are a type of institutional arrangement with autonomy and broad decision-making capabilities. The separation from elected governments induced by greater independence generated criticism from some authors, who pointed to a democratic deficit in the operation of these bodies. On the other hand, the existence of participation mechanisms is pointed out as an alternative to provide adequate checks and balances, especially in the rulemaking process. The present work aims, from the study of notice-and-comment processes carried out by Anatel and Anvisa, to better understand the rulemaking process. For this, the contributions received by regulatory agencies and their respective responses are used as databases ("text as data") , seeking to understand the reasons for an agency to change drafts of regulatory texts. As a research strategy, the study uses internet data scraping techniques and artificial intelligence tools, especially natural language processing (NLP) to obtain evidence.