Conflict and Concord Over Unconventional Oil and Gas Production in the US

• In Event: Policy Feedback, Conflict and Process Tracing

Abstract

Understanding the characteristics of policy conflict and concord has been an ongoing challenge for scholars and policymakers alike, as the tools for measuring policy conflicts and determining which are the triggers for conflict remain underdeveloped. While some approaches, such as the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF), have improved our capacity to detect and describe policy conflicts in a localized manner, studies examining policy conflict in comparative settings and/or over time are still lacking.
In this paper, we present a new methodological approach for detecting the presence and evolution of policy conflicts in the heavily politically-contested policy arena of unconventional oil and gas development in the United States. Specifically, we use topic modelling to examine the level of conflict that arose from 2007 through 2017 in the 15 U.S. states that led the production of oil and gas through the use of hydraulic fracturing in that decade, as reported by the most important printed media outlets of each state. We analyze tens of thousands of articles, combining hand-coding and computer-based semi-automated coding techniques to produce a detailed description of conflict associated with key groups of terms (i.e. “topics”) which can be used to represent both benefits and costs of hydraulic fracturing (e.g. environmental costs and economic benefits). Our results produce the most comprehensive description hitherto of the topics that drive conflict and concord on the issue of unconventional oil and gas production in the United States of America.

Authors

• Ramiro Berardo, The Ohio State University

• Federico Holm, The Ohio State University

• Tanya Heikkila, University of Colorado-Denver

• Jennifer Kagan, University of Colorado Denver

• Chris Weible, University of Colorado-Denver

• Hongtao Yi, The Ohio State University