by Catherine Chen
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, has brought down the price of natural gas in the U.S. and made it an energy exporter to the U.K. and Germany, among other countries. In the meantime, anti-fracking movements have swept through states with rich shale gas reservoirs. Political conflicts about fracking play out on the national stage, featuring Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign promise of “no more drilling on federal lands”, and the “Drill Baby Drill” shawl worn by Congresswoman Lauren Boebert to the 2022 State of Union speech. Beyond these high-profile displays, citizens bear the day-to-day consequences of fracking, be it economic opportunities or environmental damages. Do state-level fracking policies genuinely respond to local public opinion? What are the driving forces behind the responsiveness of energy development policies?
My recently published research article, entitled Policy responsiveness and media attention, aims to address these questions by considering the media’s role as an intermediary between the public and the legislators within a U.S. context. Local newspapers, not national cable television, inform citizens of local affairs and state politics. Regarding matters such as releasing liquid from fracking production to a soil farm as a dumping ground, a local newspaper’s coverage is the source that local residents rely on, which in turn could lead to a bill proposal about regulating soil farms in the statehouse.
My study focuses on this process of state legislation responding to media coverage. I trace such policy responsiveness by analysing 8,903 pieces of state-level media reports and 169 pieces of legislation featuring fracking issues in 15 U.S. states from 2007 to 2017. I use the topic modeling approach in machine learning to tease out prevalent topics in news articles published in the period leading up to the proposal of a bill and examine whether the bill responds to media coverage by addressing these prevalent topics. I focus on the political leaning of state government, whether the legislator of a bill is a Republican or a Democrat, and the state’s unemployment rate at the time, and investigate how these factors affect whether a proposed bill targets prevalent topics previously reported in the news.
My results show that fracking topics in the news are consistently picked up by legislatures in Democratic-leaning states. However, when the unemployment rate is high, legislators will likely pay more attention to creating jobs than regulating fracking. A bill seems more responsive to news published within six months before the bill proposal when the bill’s initiator is a Democrat. However, when considering older news stories published before the six-month window, whether the bill initiator is a Democrat or Republican does not influence the responsiveness of legislation to media attention.
How do we make sense of the findings? I argue that although the media does have the power to draw public attention to fracking issues, parties’ and politicians’ preferences significantly shape what they respond to in the media agenda. Moreover, political and socioeconomic factors constrain policymaking’s democratic potential to be genuinely responsive to energy development issues like fracking.
Given that a key indicator of democratic performance is the extent to which policies are genuinely responsive to public opinion, this research confirms that policies do respond to media attention with chronological precision. It also examines the driving forces behind such responsiveness. In this way, this article advances our understanding of policymaking’s democratic implications for unconventional energy development and highlights how policymakers can respond strategically to media attention.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Chen, C. (2023). Policy responsiveness and media attention. Policy & Politics, 51(3), 602-625 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16841402132985
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