Jill Yordy

The ACF posits policy actors' beliefs play a crucial role in shaping policy change dynamics. Policy is a rough translation of beliefs, thereby putting individual and collective values into the practice of shaping society. However, critiques have argued the ACF (1) neglects theoretic consideration of the role democracy plays in the policy process and (2) provides an underdeveloped conceptualization of actors’ policy-oriented belief systems. This chapter addresses these critiques simultaneously because individual beliefs about democracy can vary widely within a democratic society, thus providing an opportunity to explore a novel dimension of variation in policy actor beliefs under the ACF. Using a grounded theory approach, this study examines in-depth policy actor interviews from two municipal housing policy subsystems and finds actors hold diverse beliefs about democracy and most apply their democracy-oriented beliefs to multiple tiers of their policy-oriented beliefs. The ACF has overlooked the importance of the relationship between democracy- and policy-oriented beliefs.

The sociology of emotions reveals how emotion contributes to and helps inform social and political issues. This study contributes to the literature by examining how competing advocacy coalitions ascribe emotions to their allies and opponents in the politically contentious issue of siting a gas pipeline project in the US. It analyses the emotional and belief expressions of people engaged in the debate in approximately 370 newspaper articles. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework as a theoretical guide, people’s position on the pipeline and assignment to one of two advocacy coalitions coincides with similar emotional expressions. Moreover, allies tend to attribute more positive than negative emotions to other allies and more negative than positive emotions to opponents. This study concludes with a research agenda for furthering the empirical study of emotions in political and social life to understand the use of emotions in contentious politics.

Emotions are involved in virtually every aspect of human cognition, including information processing and decision-making. Thus, to understand political conflict and policy decision-making more fully, we must strive to understand the role of emotions in these phenomena. This paper explores expressed emotions in protests related to the policy decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic. We collect and analyze data on expressed emotions from protests in four U.S. states covered in 185 articles from 66 newspapers. We use an integrated method analysis that incorporates elements of Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) and interpretive analysis of emotions. Our DNA analysis shows differing distributions of emotions across protests against government restrictions and for restrictions to protect vulnerable populations from COVID-19. From these distributions, fear emerges as one of the more prominent emotions linked to an actor’s role in the process and the context. We use interpretive analysis of emotions to understand the role of fear better. This paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, we contribute empirically to the theoretical arguments to integrate structural, cultural, and relational analyses of emotions in politics. Second, we offer a rare combination of methods to code and analyze emotions in texts.

Across the world, public administration and policy decisions are related to diverse levels of conflict and attention. However, the degree and variance of conflict and attention remain largely unspecified. This article examines how types of energy infrastructure and characteristics of project location are associated with the distribution of conflict and attention around the energy infrastructure siting process. Our empirical focus is on gas pipelines, electricity transmission lines, solar power projects, and wind power projects across the United States in 2018. Primarily relying on regression analysis and interviews, this article finds differences in the distribution of conflict and attention intensity within and between these energy infrastructure types, with gas pipelines and wind power projects presenting relatively higher conflict and attention intensities. However, conflict and attention are skewed to low intensities across infrastructure types. Characteristics of project locations that are positively associated with high conflict and attention intensity include the proportion of Democratic voters and the level of urbanization in the places where projects are sited. In contrast, the proportion of Black or Hispanic residents is negatively associated with high conflict and attention intensity.

Measuring policy conflict and concord about natural resource and environmental issues has been a challenge for scholars. While some have assessed policy conflict and concord in particular locations, current approaches are inadequate for measuring and comparing them across settings or over time. This research note offers a methodological approach for measuring policy conflict and concord through a systematic analysis of the news media. The approach combines hand-coding and computer-based, semi-automated techniques. We illustrate it in an analysis of policy debates over shale oil and gas development in Colorado and Ohio between 2007 and 2017. This research note concludes with its methodological contributions for enriching comparative research on policy conflict and concord in natural resource and environmental issues, along with potential limitations.

The way in which public policies are composed may lead to conflicts that manifest in an extended policymaking duration. This paper explores the associations between policy composition and the relative duration for policies to be adopted in 15 U.S. state legislatures. We treat policy passage duration as an indicator of policy conflicts in the legislative process. We adapt the institutional grammar tool (IGT) to examine how 168 oil and gas development policies are composed and gauge the association between the content of these policies and the speed of their adoption. We find policies that are more stringent, contain more constitutive rules, target issues related to oil and gas operations or tax and finance take relatively longer to pass. These findings offer theoretical insights into the relationships between policy composition and policy adoption duration. They also provide methodological insights on measuring policy design components using a semi‐automated application of the IGT.

Researchers often focus on the most intense conflicts, skewing our perception of the diversity and nature of policy conflicts. The paper examines the discourse engaged in the siting of three pipeline projects under construction, each with varying levels of conflict, and one rejected project of high conflict. We analyze over 700 newspaper articles that span the life of each proposed pipeline and supplement the news media data with interviews. Using these data, we compare differences in actor types, frames, and behaviors in natural gas pipeline siting processes characterized by high, medium, and low conflict. Comparing the characteristics of energy siting conflicts at varying intensities helps support corresponding portrayals of how people engage in the policy process. This paper offers theoretical and empirical guidance on understanding policy conflict intensity variation.

This paper compares and contrasts high‐conflict policy debates over the siting of three natural gas pipeline projects at different decision stages of the siting process. This paper draws on over 600 newspaper articles spanning 3 years, analyzed through Discourse Network Analysis. Drawing from the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Policy Conflict framework, this paper finds that actor framing of opposing policy beliefs involves more indirect than direct confrontations, with statements in the media waxing and waning over time. Opponents of the pipelines more often explicitly argue against pipelines, while also using a broad range of conceptual arguments, whereas proponents more often couch their arguments around the economic benefits of pipelines and use fewer conceptual frames overall. We also find evidence that opposing coalitions use similar framing across different decision contexts. This paper concludes with a commentary on the status and contributions of this paper to the study of policy conflicts and next steps in advancing similar research agendas.