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Abstract Scholars have spent decades arguing that policy entrepreneurs, change agents who work individually and in groups to influence the policy process, can be crucial in introducing policy innovation and spurring policy change. How to identify policy entrepreneurs empirically has received less attention. This oversight is consequential because scholars trying to understand when policy entrepreneurs emerge, and why, and what makes them more or less successful, need to be able to identify these change agents reliably and accurately. This paper explores the ways policy entrepreneurs are currently identified and highlights issues with current approaches. We introduce a new technique for eliciting and distinguishing policy entrepreneurs, coupling automated and manual analysis of local news media and a survey of policy entrepreneur candidates. We apply this technique to the empirical case of unconventional oil and gas drilling in Pennsylvania and derive some tentative results concerning factors which increase entrepreneurial efficacy.
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Social Networks and Policy Entrepreneurship: How Relationships Shape Municipal Decision Making about High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing
Well-resourced and well-connected individuals, or “policy entrepreneurs,” often play an important role in advocating and securing the adoption of policies. There is a striking lack of inquiry into the ways that social networks shape the ability of these actors to achieve their aims, including the ways in which network ties may channel policy conflict. To address these gaps, we analyze data from an original survey and an original database of policies to assess the success of policy entrepreneurs active in a highly contentious arena: municipal policymaking concerning high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) in New York. We use text-mining to collect social network data from local newspaper archives, then use those data to construct municipal HVHF policy networks. Municipal anti-HVHF policy entrepreneurs appear more successful when they operate in less cohesive networks, act as bridges to relative newcomers to the governance network, and have a larger number of network connections. Pro-HVHF policy entrepreneurs appear more successful when they can forge high-value connections to key decision-makers. Policy entrepreneurs on both sides of the issue are more successful when they have a greater number of sympathetic coalition partners.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1535004
- PAR ID:
- 10030115
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Policy studies journal
- ISSN:
- 1541-0072
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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