In a recent article published in Policy & Politics, Laurent Lioté, Adam Cooper and Neil Strachan examine how engineering advisers contribute to policy making in the context of UK energy policy. Despite the growing importance of engineering solutions to address societal challenges like climate change, the authors highlight a notable gap in academic research on how engineering advice is actually used — and understood — within government.
A central hypothesis in the influential policy process theory, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) posits that major policy change is unlikely if the coalition defending the status quo retains power. However, operationalising which coalition is in power has proven challenging.
In my recent article on this topic published in Policy and Politics, I argue that coalition power can be operationalised based on two dimensions: formal authority over decisions (hard power) and the ability to shape policy preferences through discourse (soft power). Employing discourse network analysis to capture the relative dominance of competing coalitions based on discourse interactions, I analysed the contentious 20-year-old debate surrounding the proposed liberalisation of the Mexican electricity generation sector.
The findings align with the ACF hypothesis; they show that the status quo coalition maintained consistent soft power when two reform attempts to liberalise the sector failed. This discursive dominance corresponded with continued policy stability, supporting the ACF hypothesis. However, major policy change occurred when the reforming coalition gained discursive influence and internal consensus, leading to a shift in soft power dynamics.
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.
Caroline Kuzemko, Mathieu Blondeel, and Antony Froggatt.
Now, a year and a half post the end of the transition period and as the Northern Ireland Protocol bill passes its first round of votes in the House of Commons, is a good moment to assess the implications of Brexit for UK energy and climate policy.
Brexit was framed as a route back towards a truly ‘Great’ Britain. Getting Brexit done was meant to ‘take back control of our money, laws and borders’ and enable new, global trading relationships, whilst also reducing bureaucratic burdens and keeping public funds in the UK, to be spent on the NHS. This infers that the UK would be able to do things ‘better’ than the EU.
Politicians in Great Britain are severely constrained when it comes to influencing the energy system. This is largely because decision making has been delegated – away from elected representatives to technical experts, and, specifically in the case of energy markets, to the regulator, Ofgem (the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets). Although legislation can attempt to shape Ofgem’s work, the impact of attempts to do so have been mixed at best. Continue reading →
Are you planning a new policy or politics-focused course? Or maybe you’re updating your existing syllabi with some of the newest research on policy and politics? We’re here to help! In this blog, we provide recommendations for new Policy & Politics articles (as well as a few older favorites) that make excellent contributions to syllabi for a diversity of courses. We hope this saves you time and effort in mining our recent articles while also ensuring your course materials reflect the latest research from the frontiers of the discipline. Continue reading →
Quarterly highlights collection 1 August – 31 October 2022
Welcome to this quarter’s highlights collection featuring three articles that provide a range of insights from different perspectives on policy and regulation. Continue reading →
Policy scholars are interested in the positions and preferences of politically involved actors. Those preferences can either serve as independent variables (for example, to explain coordination among or the strategic behaviour of actors), or as dependent variables (for example to evaluate actors’ coherence over time). But how do I identify these policy positions or preferences? Should I perform interviews or code the official statements of actors involved in policymaking? How valuable are my survey results in comparison to media data? These are typical questions concerning methods of data gathering and there are unlikely to be absolute answers to the question of which is the best method. However, our recent Policy & Politics article contributes to the discussion regarding these questions and is based on unique data drawn from three cases. Using these data, it compares actor statements about policies, gathered once through surveys and once through text coding official statements. Continue reading →
Elizabeth Blakelock and John Turnpenny
Elizabeth Koebele with Sarah Brown
Karin Ingold
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 