Standard Research Grant: Conditions Favoring Consensus in State-Level Energy Policy

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Overview This STS study in technology and policy will examine conditions that favor enhanced or reduced bipartisanship on bills concerning energy diversification and improvements in efficiency. The project will make use of newly available state government databases on bills and laws to track votes of individual legislators to perform quantitative analysis, which will be complemented by ethnographic interviews with the staff of state legislators who are highly involved in energy legislation. The project will contribute to technology studies and the technology policy side of interdisciplinary STS inquiry, specifically the body of research on transitions of large technological systems that focuses on sustainability transitions. Intellectual Merit The project breaks new methodological ground by using newly available state government databases; previous research has used only the vote of the whole legislature. At a theoretical level, the project will integrate research on transitions, which tends to have a strong management and policy orientation, with work in political sociology. That is to say, it will bring a political sociological approach to the study of the transitions of large technological systems, and likewise it will bring technology studies theory into the political sociology of science. Thus, the project will make substantial and rather broad theoretical and methodological contributions to the literature on energy transitions and the science and technology studies of large technological systems. It will also contribute knowledge to a practical and important policy problem. Broader Impacts One of the broader goals of the project is to affect policy by informing state legislators, and possibly Congress, about the types of energy laws that are most and least likely to achieve bipartisan support. The results of this project should be valuable to legislators across partisan divisions and with widely divergent views about optimal energy futures, and the material will also be publicly available for use in energy and technology policy courses. The project will have two publication components. A web site will be created that provides the first detailed analysis of votes on energy legislation by political party affiliation in state legislatures. A policy brief will be made publicly available; it will include summary statistics of votes by law name, description and type of legislation, and party affiliation, as well as an analysis of law types that tend to produce higher levels of bipartisanship based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis. State legislative offices will be contacted by email when the brief is available, and there will be a press release as well.