Disentangling Local Policy Elite's Decision-Making on Sustainable Energy Policies: An Arkansas Perspective

Abstract

The local policy arena is ripe for research related to local policy elites’ decisionmaking, which is one of the critical aspects in understanding the political process of policymaking. Where policy adoption and diffusion are concerned in policy studies, much previous research focuses on state-to-state dynamics, which leaves room to expand our understanding about the policy adoption and diffusion process at the local level. We argue that identification of individual level determinants that signify policy adoption is key to fostering this knowledge. Accordingly, focusing upon the grid-group cultural theory of policy preference formation posited by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, this paper provides a theoretical and empirical examination of such factors among local policy elites at city jurisdictions in Northwest Arkansas within the context of their policy preferences toward energy efficiency and renewable energy. Through an analysis of data collected from an Internet survey of 416 policy elites in major Arkansas cities between March 17th and August 11th in 2014, we found that strong egalitarians are more likely to support various sustainable energy policies in their communities, whereas strong individualists are less likely to support such policies. While policymakers and business leaders with a strong hierarch proclivity are more likely to support energy efficiency and renewable energy solutions at the local level, their support was not as strong as egalitarian elites’. Meanwhile, fatalism was not a significant dimension of cultural predisposition in the formation of sustainable energy policy preferences among the local elites.