Doctoral Dissertation Research: Public Beliefs and Responses to Industrial Sites

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Public responses to industrial projects shape the distribution of health and environmental risks within society. They also influence the social acceptance, government regulation, and economic viability of new technologies and industries. This dissertation uses the context of the unfolding boom in gas and oil production enabled by hydraulic fracturing technology to investigate how alternative conceptions of the risks and benefits of industrial projects structure the mobilization of public opposition and support. First, the research distinguishes between NIMBY ("Not in my backyard") opponents who mobilize on the basis of perceived local impacts, and ideological opponents who react to the industry from a larger set of political beliefs and values. Second, the researchers examine support for industrial siting that has received little attention in existing scholarship. The project introduces public comments as a new source of data for measuring public opinion. The project has potentially important implications for understanding political dynamics behind decisions to site and expand a rapidly-growing industry. The methods used for this study should be broadly applicable to other areas of study that can benefit from "big data." Current energy development in the United States brings renewed social science to explain public reactions to industrial siting. This research tests "NIMBY" (not in my backyard) against a complementary explanation of public response to industrial siting based on residents' ideological commitments to help to reconcile inconsistent empirical findings about the relationship between proximity and opposition. The project will examine 91,000 public comments submitted during the regulatory reviews of hydraulic fracturing in two states, Illinois and New York. First, researchers will generate a comprehensive mapping of the relationship between geographic proximity and mobilization for and against proposed hydraulic fracturing projects. Second, the researchers will combine the comments with measures of community context and with individual-level measures of ideology to evaluate competing explanations of mobilization for, and against, industrial siting in a series of statistical analyses. Finally, as a direct test of the proposed theoretical mechanism, the researchers will use natural language processing techniques to code the body of comments for the different ways that commenters talk about hydraulic fracturing. For research on industrial siting, public comments data offer three specific advantages: (1) they offer a behavioral measure of opposition and support of an industry (2) they are geocoded, allowing for precise measurement of a commenter?s proximity to proposed industrial sites, and (3) the text of public comments gives unprecedented insight into the different conceptions that people develop of industry impacts. The results of the analysis, especially the relative effects of proximity and political ideology, may have implications for understanding the dynamics of other policy debates. Finally, the proposed project will demonstrate innovative approaches based on natural language techniques and machine learning concepts to studying these dynamics using existing public records, as well as the use of rigorous multiple methods.