Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In any democratic governing system, we will observe political manifestations of both concord and conflict over public policy issues. Yet, their characteristics over time and across issues remain largely unknown. The purpose of this paper is to analyze concord and conflict over the siting of four different forms of energy infrastructure: solar, onshore wind, transmission lines, and oil and gas pipelines. The data come media articles in the U.S., published between 2013 and 2017, which deal directly with one or more specific instances of energy infrastructure siting. The analysis uses a combination of manual coding and semi-automated coding, and is guided by the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF). At a basic level, the PCF argues that policy conflicts are characterized by divergence in policy positions, perceived threats, and an unwillingness to compromise among actors. These characteristics manifest in conflict behaviors (i.e., political strategies to influence policy decisions).

First, we present an automated analysis of approximately 5,000 articles to document the diversity and types of policy actors who are discussing energy infrastructure decisions, in what locations, and the extent to which policy actors take similar or divergent policy positions around specific energy infrastructure siting decisions over time. We also identify indicators of whether actors engage in conflict behaviors associated with particular siting decisions. The automated analysis provides an initial, large-n set of proxy indicators of the level of conflict associated with different siting decisions, and how those change over time. To provide a more robust assessment of conflict, we manually code a sample of 200 articles associated with specific cases of the four types of infrastructure projects. The manual coding measures the differences or similarities in policy positions of actors involved in a siting decisions, instances and of perceived threats among policy actors, instances of attempts to compromise (if any), and specific types of conflict behaviors (if any).

The results uncover a spectrum of cases, spanning from policy concord to policy conflict. On the concord-end of the spectrum, we identify little if any instances of disagreement, minimal perceived threats from others and need for compromise, and few political activities. On the conflict-end of the spectrum, we find higher levels of divergent policy positions, perceived threats, and compromises over energy infrastructure siting, accompanied by spurts in conflict behaviors. The results also show that the type of energy infrastructure influences where the siting issue falls on the concord-conflict spectrum. We conclude this paper with a summary of the theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on policy conflicts and energy siting controversies. The conclusion also explores the role of policy concord and conflict in society. That is, both policy concord and policy conflict have a place in any democracy and while we cannot make claims about the normative value of either, we can make strides toward better descriptions of them across time and topics.