Folks, Can you help me disseminate this article, which is free via the Web? For theorists, I offer a "theory of perverse incentives" and for environmental sociologists, there is my perhaps now familiar case against the mass email movement targeting US regulatory agencies. ~Stu "The Case Against Mass E-mails: Perverse Incentives and Low Quality Public Participation in U.S. Federal Rulemaking" http://www.psocommons.org/policyandinternet/vol1/iss1/art2/?sending=10820 (free guest access available) Abstract Large-scale e-mail campaigns are a staple in the modern environmental movement. Interest groups increasingly use online mobilizations as a way to raise awareness, money, and membership. There are legitimate political, economic, and organizational reasons for doing so, but these gains may come at the expense of a more substantial and efficacious role for citizens who wish to use e-mail to engage in public participation. This paper situates a close examination of the 1000 longest modified MoveOn.org-generated e-mails sent to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about its 2004 mercury rulemaking, in the broader context of online grassroots lobbying. The findings indicate that only a tiny portion of these public comments constitute potentially relevant new information for the EPA to consider. The vast majority of MoveOn comments are either exact duplicates of a two-sentence form letter, or they are variants of a small number of broad claims about the inadequacy of the proposed rule. This paper argues that norms, rules, and tools will emerge to deal with the burden imposed by these communications. More broadly, it raises doubts about the notion that online public participation is a harbinger of a more deliberative and democratic era. *A few sound bites:* "This article looks at the practical and policy impact of mass e-mail campaigns. It focuses theoretical and empirical attention on the competing—and yes, perverse—incentives for large-scale citizen input to the regulatory rulemaking process. It is akin to perverse satisfaction, I argue, to cathartically exercise a right while inadvertently destroying it." "In what follows, I introduce the theory of perverse incentives in the context of interest group-initiated mass e-mail campaigns about U.S. regulatory policy. Stated bluntly, the logic of collection action many scholars my age and older grew up with is dead. The Internet killed it." "Some studies of interest group lobbying carry forward out-of-date assumptions found in much of the canonical lobbying literature (e.g., grassroots lobbying is costly and time-consuming, subject to unavoidable free-rider problems when the benefits are widely dispersed). These assumptions reflect a pre-Internet landscape. The collective action thesis (Olson, 1965) cogently captured the increased difficulty of organizing members as the group size grew larger. Olson’s truism, however, is being updated in ways that fail to recognize that the old constraints on collective action are less of a factor (Esteban & Ray, 2001). If Olson’s logic of collective action is a less viable theory, the rising role of electronic grassroots lobbying may prove to be one of the key reasons (Lev-On & Hardin, 2007; Davis, Elin, & Reeher, 2002). Twenty-first century studies of interest groups must start with the assumption of reduced organizing costs and shifting incentives as opportunities for laptop and hand-held participation multiply."