Comparing the Fractures and Seams: An Analysis of Advocacy Coalitions around Hydraulic Fracturing in Argentina, China, and the U.S. through Coded News Media

Advocacy coalitions are networks of actors – both governmental and non-governmental – who actively engage in trying to influence policy debates within a policy subsystem. Understanding how advocacy coalitions form and interact has been a fundamental question in the field of public policy, particularly within the scholarship grounded in the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). A sizeable body of ACF literature has sought to identify how coalitions form, how their members coordinate their policy positions and mobilize their resources, and how policy outcomes are shaped through the interactions that they have with members of opposing coalitions. The framework has also been applied across multiple countries and policy contexts. However, few studies have explored the ACF in a comparative context to understand whether and to what extent the formation of coalitions and their patterns of interactions within a particular subsystem are similar or differ across countries or institutional settings. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by comparing the formation and structure of coalitions around the issue of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas and oil development in three countries: the U.S., China, and Argentina. Advancements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques in the past decade have enabled the recovery of vast stocks of oil and gas contained in non-porous shale formations that have been historically difficult to mine. This expansion of shale oil and gas has sparked major political and social debates about the potential risks and benefits of the activity, and the appropriate tools for regulating it. While shale oil and gas development has been most prominent in the U.S., Argentina and China are two countries with some of the highest estimated recoverable shale oil and gas worldwide. Provinces in these two countries are currently in the exploration/early exploitation phase. Within this context, this paper asks four related questions to identify and compare coalitions across the U.S., Argentina, and China: 1) Who are the actors involved in policy debates and advocacy around shale oil and gas? 2) Who do actors agree/disagree with and explicitly coordinate their positions with? 3) In what venues do actors interact? To overcome the challenge of collecting real time data on coalitions across three countries using traditional survey techniques, this paper uses coded data from newspaper articles in 2013 and 2014 within selected states/provinces across all three countries where hydraulic fracturing has come to affect the landscape of energy policies. To analyze and compare these data, we use both descriptive statistics, and social network analysis. We also explore and discuss whether and to what extent the political, social, and economic contexts surrounding shale oil and gas help explain any differences in the coalitions’ size, level of conflict, and patterns of interactions across the three countries.