Measuring Policy Conflict and Concord

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Hydraulic fracturing
• News media
• policy conflict
• policy concord
• policy process
• shale oil and gas

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Correction

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2022.2048589)

Notes

1 We excluded the following categories of articles from our analysis: opinions, editorials, or letters to the editor; articles only tangentially related to oil and gas issues; articles exclusively about federal issues, global issues, or issues in another state; and briefs or short summaries of a series of news topics where only one of which is oil and gas related.

Additional information

Funding

The U.S. National Science Foundation provided funding for this research with a grant entitled “Collaborative research: A comparative diagnosis of policy conflicts: Examining unconventional oil and gas development across the United States” [GRT00046515].