The Politics of Hydraulic Fracturing: An ACF Approach to the Role of Public Agencies in Policy Processes

The advocacy coalition framework conceptualizes the policy process as a political struggle among advocacy coalitions of policy actors within a policy subsystem. Compared to their interest-group allies, within a coalition, public agencies are assumed to hold more moderate policy beliefs and preferences. If this is true, do public agencies consequently facilitate compromises in policy processes? This assumption and this question require a comparative perspective to be addressed, which has not been done so far in ACF research, to our knowledge. In this paper, we address them on the basis of a dataset of several hundreds of newspaper articles about the politics of hydraulic fracturing over years in multiple countries. The quantitative data coded and aggregated at the national level are qualitatively compared at the international level. The results suggest that the policy positions of public agencies are less moderate than could be expected. Also, there is variety among public agencies in terms of how moderate their positions are. Still, there is a relation between the policy moderation of public agencies and policy compromises. With these results, our contribution is not only theoretical: empirically speaking, we do also bring light into the reasons that led different countries to allow or to ban hydraulic fracturing, from a policy process perspective.