Assessing Policy Designs and Policy Debate: Lessons for the IAD's Grammar Tool

In managing natural resources, conflicts often arise over how best to design policies. The design of policies can affect who receives benefits or burdens of the policies, especially when rules that constrain or limit certain actions target specific groups, or when penalties are assigned for noncompliance. When such rules are proposed, often debates around the design lead to compromise and discussions among policymakers, which then are accommodated in the final design of policies. Yet, theoretical and empirical assessments that can link policy designs to conflicts that arise around the governance of natural resources are not well developed. This paper uses the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework’s Grammar Tool and Rule Typology, with semi-automated text coding tools, to develop a method for analyzing the design of formal policies and the likely indicators of policy design that would be associated with conflict or contentiousness. The study examines approximately 200 legislative policies from 15 oil and gas producing states in the U.S. and assesses how the design of proposed policies is related to the degree of change in the design of the final adopted policies. In examining the design features of the policies, we measure the number of different actors targeted by enforceable rules (“musts” versus “mays”) in the policies, the types of rules they must adhere to, and the degree of government and non-government entities tied by their responsibilities and roles in the governance of oil and gas development in their respective states. This paper contributes to the literature by providing a generalizable and systematic semi-automated approach for textual analyses of public policies, while also demonstrating how theoretical insights on the relationship between policy designs and policy conflicts can be measured. In doing so, this paper lays the foundation for a better integration of the IAD into theories of public policy. The paper concludes with a research agenda that details such a path.