Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The focus of this study is to understand policy elites’ distinctive cognitive patterns of policy narratives, a rarely explored area of research within the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) scholarship. In particular, we investigate how and why local policy elites selectively perceive and retrieve certain elements of various competing narratives (e.g., setting, characters, plot, and moral), if any, in the controversial policy debate regarding the benefits and risks associated with the use of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), an unconventional oil and gas extraction method. In doing so, we computer-analyze the patterns of policy elites’ “intentional representations” of fracking by evaluating semantic expressions extracted from their open-ended description on fracking practices embedded in a unique survey design recently implemented in Arkansas (a state with active fracking) and Oregon (a state with no fracking activity). More importantly, we further examine the relationship between policy elites’ cognitive patterns and other theory-driven correlates such as cultural orientations, ideology, fracking benefit-risk perceptions, and demographic characteristics. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings contribute to advancing the NPF, along with the practical and methodological ramifications of this research.