What Motivates Policy Entrepreneurs?

• In Event: Energy Policy and Politics

Abstract

Why do policy entrepreneurs engage in advocacy and what sustains their efforts? We investigate this question in the context of policy advocacy opposing high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region. Motivation is undertheorized and underexplored in policy entrepreneurship studies, not least because few scholars engage directly with the policy entrepreneurs whose behaviors they describe. The conventional wisdom, based on Kingdon (1984), is that people pursue entrepreneurship because they view the potential gains, material or non-material, as greater than the costs of advocacy. There are two problems with this “thin” explanation of policy entrepreneur motives. First, it fails to provide scholars and practitioners information about specific drivers that could be leveraged to catalyze or sustain entrepreneurism, or which could be reduced in efforts to hamper entrepreneurism. Second, it implies that entrepreneurs view gains as potentially achievable, and thus offers limited explanation for why some individuals and groups persist in policy advocacy over many years and through many failures: when lived experience shows advocates that real gains are unlikely or minimal, why do they keep pursuing often costly advocacy efforts? We offer a “thick” corrective to the literature’s thin account of motivation, drawing insights from 20 interviews with policy entrepreneurs who have opposed fracking in local, state, and national policy debates. Initial findings highlight the importance of intrinsic motivation and pro-social ethos, such as “wanting to be a good ancestor” and the knowledge that one stood up for what was right, even in unwinnable battles. The interview project also is the first attempt to qualitatively ground-truth a survey-based index for identifying policy entrepreneurship proposed and piloted by Arnold and coauthors (2023).

Authors

• Brooke Parks, UC Davis

• Yume Shek, University of California, Davis

• Gwen Arnold, University of California, Davis