Panel Paper:
The Influence of Inter-Jurisdictional Advocacy on the Diffusion of Municipal Fracking Policies in New York
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
New York placed a moratorium on fracking in 2008 in order to study it and adjust relevant regulations. The moratorium stretched on more than seven years as state legislators and regulators found themselves trapped in “paralysis by analysis.” Advocates on both sides shifted their lobbying from Albany to the state’s cities, towns, and villages. Pro-fracking advocates encouraged municipalities to pass resolutions calling for the state to complete its review expeditiously and expressing local support for fracking. Anti-fracking advocates encouraged municipalities to establish fracking moratoriums, effectively ban fracking by defining it as heavy industry and modifying comprehensive plans so as to prohibit that land use, establish road use restrictions on fracking-associated heavy truck traffic, and more.
This project explores the role of policy entrepreneurship in facilitating diffusion of fracking policies among municipalities. Scholars have given much attention to how diffusion processes are driven by jurisdictions’ efforts to compete with, learn from, and copy one another. Less is known about the contribution critical actors make in triggering these processes. Policy entrepreneurs (PEs) are individuals who devote substantial time, resources, and energy toward securing a favored policy outcome. Commentators noted the important role of PEs in pushing for local fracking policies, describing (for example) the efforts of Helen and David Slottje, Ithaca-based lawyers who visited more than 80 municipalities, encouraging them to use land use authorities to restrict fracking. We explore the empirical evidence for such claims by tracking inter-municipal fracking policy advocacy across a contiguous 10-county region in New York. We hypothesize that municipalities will be more likely to adopt fracking policies after they are subject to PE advocacy, and more likely to adopt policy types that their PE previously successfully championed. We expect these dynamics to be mediated by the point in the local policy process at which the PE enters and the extent of conflict within the jurisdiction between pro- and anti-fracking PEs.
This investigation leverages two original datasets: A full-text archive of all fracking policies passed by New York municipalities, 2008-2012, and a comprehensive collection of articles on topics related to oil and gas production and published, 2008-2012, in New York local newspapers with online archives. Text mining allows us to identify from newspaper texts the advocates involved in local fracking debates; we then use social network techniques to identify the networks of PEs whose advocacy spans jurisdictions. After employing event history analysis to statistically model the impact of typical covariates (e.g., citizens’ wealth) on diffusion of municipal fracking policies, we introduce variables capturing PE dynamics (e.g., the extent of the entrepreneur’s success in previous efforts) and assess the extent to which they improve our ability to model the pattern and nature of local fracking policy adoption.
