Panel Paper:
Measuring and Mapping Policy Conflicts in Unconventional Oil and Gas Policy Networks across U.S. States
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Unconventional oil and gas development is a prime example of the types of policy issue where conflicts among diverse types of actors are engaged at the state level in shaping policy debates. Guided by the PCF, this study seeks to address the following related research questions: How do policy actors involved in unconventional oil and gas development policy networks compare across states? Is their involvement stable over time? Do characteristics at the state level, such as oil and gas production capacity, explain differences in the typology of these networks? We hypothesize that the networks vary significantly across states and over time, based on both systemic and individual-level attributes.
To address our research questions, we collect and analyze news reports on unconventional oil and gas production published in five different states that vary in their levels of oil and gas activity (California, Colorado, Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania) from 2008 to 2017. We develop a well-documented codebook for analyzing articles in the two newspapers in each state, focusing on information about policy actors, their beliefs about the topic, and potential conflictive views with others. In additional to manual coding of the articles, we use machine learning based techniques to perform our analysis. In the initial analysis of newspaper articles in Colorado and Ohio, we identify around 1300 and 500 articles respectively for each state, with Colorado having more policy actors, more activities and more intense level of policy conflicts than Ohio. We expect the instruments developed in this study will allow for efficient and consistent data collection efforts on policy conflicts and policy networks over the long run.
In addition to building knowledge about the networks of actors involved in policy conflicts over oil and gas development, this research is among a small group of studies thatexamine the evolution of policy subsystems and policy networks over at least a decade across different states in the U.S.