Policy Responsiveness and Media Attention

• In Event: Responding to Dynamic Environmental Risks

Abstract

In the age of misinformation and disinformation, how legislative efforts respond to public discourse is a front-and-center issue for the healthy functioning of democracies. This issue is especially salient in the realm of energy development. In less than two decades, oil and gas development in the U.S. has expanded extensively. Hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") technologies have been widely used in many states with shale formations and coal bed methane. Much of the legal and administrative purview over oil and gas development in the U.S. happens at the state level (Weible et al., pp. 29 – 30, 2016). Correspondingly, much media coverage surrounding fracking has taken place (Heikkila et al., 2017; Blair et al., 2016). Local media coverage of fracking often encompasses environmental costs and economic benefits (Olive & Delshad, 2016). Fracking has provoked protests from affected local communities (Boudet et al., 2018). Some justify the development as contributing to energy independence and transitions to a low-carbon future (Sica & Huber, 2017).

State-level legislative responses to fracking activities range from addressing concerns associated with fracking risks to fostering benefits such as jobs and tax revenues generated by this new development (Boudet et al., 2014). The political climate has driven the debates and policymaking over fracking in various directions (Berardo et al., 2020). In general, states with shale gas resources differ significantly in their policy responses to the development of fracking. For example, states with a higher percentage of voters identifying as conservative are less likely to enact protective environmental regulations. In contrast, states with a greater share of Democratic voters are more likely to pass setback requirements for drilling near buildings (Davis, 2017).

Since fracking-related issues have drawn much attention from newspapers and state legislatures in oil-and-gas-producing states, a close look into news and legislation pertinent to this theme is well warranted. The author has been contributing to a National Science Foundation project that studies the policy conflicts and concord around fracking. The project focuses on collecting and analyzing hydraulic-fracturing related media reports and state legislation from 2007 to 2017 in fifteen states that collectively hold a heavy share of the shale natural gas reserves in the U.S. For this project, 8,903 news reports and 169 pieces of state legislation have been analyzed.

Which political and socioeconomic factors contribute to policies' responsiveness to issues covered in the media? Existing literature has explored policy responsiveness, media's agenda-setting power, and how such media's effect on political agenda is contingent on political context factors such as issue ownership. However, the literature has yet to measure policy responsiveness to media attention on a fine-grained level with chronological precision, let alone testing the theoretical linkages between factors contributing to or mitigating the politically contingent media effects and policy responsiveness. This study employs novel text datasets and a new methodological approach to explore state policy responsiveness to media attention with hydraulic fracturing as the issue area of focus.

I expect that policy responsiveness to fracking issues in the media is contingent on legislators' issue ownership and the state government's political leaning. I also expect that issues directly experienced by the public or observed by politicians, such as the unemployment rate, mitigate the policy responsiveness to fracking issues. To test these hypotheses, I use topic modeling to construct the outcome variable that reflects policy responsiveness to news reports published in each state within one year or six months leading up to a bill's proposal. Logistic regression models are then estimated to test predictor variables' effects on whether a bill's topic is related to issues covered in the news content.

Findings suggest that Democrat-leaning state governments consistently show more policy responsiveness to fracking-related issues covered in the media than Republican-leaning state governments, regardless of the time frame. In contrast, the effects of legislators' partisan affiliation and unemployment rate are time contingent. A bill is more responsive to news published within six months before the bill proposal when the bill's initiator is a Democrat but not to news published further back. The unemployment rate is negatively correlated with the likelihood of a bill responding to topics that emerged in the news within six months before the bill's proposal date: When the unemployment rate is high, legislators are likely to pay more attention to creating jobs than any other issues, including fracking. The findings further our understanding of policymaking's democratic implications on unconventional energy development.

Author

• Catherine Chen, Hamilton College