Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Public policy decisions targeted at energy development can spark varying degrees of conflict. When policies are proposed, debates over the policies can be acute and intense, or they may spark more modest conflict, or even agreement. At the same time, policy debates may often intersect with chronic and ongoing disputes that can pervade policy subsystems. However, which types of policies drive different types or levels of conflict, and how these issues vary across policy settings, are not well understood. Guided by the Policy Conflict Framework, this paper assesses how legislative policy decisions focused on shale oil and gas development are related to indicators of policy conflict and concord. In doing so, this study compares these relationships across 15 states overlying active shale plays in the U.S. over a 10-year time frame.

The data on policy decisions were identified from state legislative databases across the 15 states and include both passed and proposed bills. The bills are coded to identify the main policy issues targeted in the legislation and relative size of legislation by number of words. The indicators for policy conflict and concord (the dependent variables) come from semi-automated news media analyses of 10,000 newspaper articles from the 15 states over the same time period as the legislative analyses. The models assess how the number of bills, the policy issues addressed, and the size of legislation in a given quarter (3-month period) for each state in a given year affect the frequency of conflict and concord indicators in the news media. The analyses also control for characteristics of the state policy settings, such as state ideology and legislative composition, interact with policy issues in shaping the types and extent of conflict observed over time.

The results show that regulatory policies that impose more constraints on how oil and gas is developed, as well as policies that extend the authority of regulatory officials, tend to spark more acute conflicts relative to other types of policies. At the same time, most policy decisions are not directly tied to publicly observable indicators of conflict in the media, but certain types of policy issues are often associated with chronic patterns of conflict depending on state level characteristics, such as state ideology and level of oil and gas development. This paper concludes with theoretical contributions about how we understand and explain patterns of conflict and concord associated with energy policies in U.S. states.