Advocacy Group Messaging on Oil and Gas

• In Event: Policy Advocacy and Advocacy Coalitions Framework

Abstract

Research suggests that advocacy groups use various narrative strategies to achieve their policy goals on social media. However, little has been written to compare the narrative strategies employed by competing advocacy groups in the U.S. oil and gas policy subsystem. Applying a text mining and network approach, this study uses the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine how advocacy groups use narrative strategies to support or oppose oil and gas development through X (formerly called Twitter) from 2009 to 2023. Structural topic modeling (STM) reveals six prominent themes, which are organized into a taxonomy of narrative strategies to show how they correlate with different groups and how they change over time. While the pro-oil and gas groups use a logic of job creation, energy security, energy independence, and energy sufficiency to emphasize policy benefits, the anti-oil and gas groups focus on policy costs including air pollution, health threats, climate change, and wildlife devastation. Furthermore, a mention network is presented based on social network analysis (SNA), demonstrating that the pro-oil and gas advocacy groups have more outgoing connections. This paper suggests a holistic approach to unveiling policy narratives as a whole and highlights the role of networks in advancing policy agendas.

Author

• Yutong Si, Columbia University