The Origin and Role of Trust in Local Policy Elites’ Perceptions of High‐Voltage Power Line Installations in the State of Arkansas

Abstract

The debate over an installation of high-voltage power lines (HVPLs) has been intense, particularly in northwest Arkansas. Detractors claim that the installation will negatively affect both the natural environment and the local economy, which contains a large tourism component. By contrast, those in favor of installing HVPLs claim that the installation is necessary in order to reliably support the increasing demand for electric power. Using original data collected from a recent statewide Internet survey of 420 local policy elites in Arkansas, this article focuses on two key aspects. First, we examine how local policy elites' perceptions of risks versus benefits of HVPL installation in their communities are influenced by their levels of trust toward information provided by various sources (e.g., energy industry, environmental groups, and government). Second, we utilize cultural theory to explain how the cultural worldviews of policy elites--specifically, egalitarianism, individualism, hierarchism, and fatalism--shape these levels of trust and HVPL benefit-risk perceptions, while controlling for other factors claimed by previous literature, including levels of knowledge on energy-related issues and demographic characteristics. In general, our analysis indicates that policy elites' value-oriented formation of HVPL benefit-risk perceptions is partially due to the influence cultural values have on trust in information sources. We conclude this article by discussing broader implications for the origin and role of trust in policy elites' decisions throughout the policy-making process.

Fracking Bad Guys: The Role of Narrative Character Affect in Shaping Hydraulic Fracturing Policy Preferences

“…We conducted causal mediation analysis using PROCESS, a macro program designed to perform mediation analysis in SPSS (Hayes, ). This mediation analysis tests the effect that narrative treatment assignment has on fracking regulation preferences operating through the mediator of character affect while controlling for demographic measures and state residency (e.g., Tumlison et al, ). Using a variation of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, the PROCESS package accommodates multiple mediator variables that operate simultaneously without modeled interactions between the independent and mediator variables (Hayes & Preacher, ).…”

“…In order to address the problem of narrative relativity (Jones, ), we leverage Cultural Theory (CT) to populate our narratives with generalizable symbols, wording, and content. CT is an approach originally developed by Mary Douglas () and then further formalized to include grid/group dimensions of sociality, where group denotes the extent to which individuals prefer and associate in groups while grid denotes the extent to which those groups prescribe and constrain preferences and behavior (e.g., Moyer & Song, ; Ripberger, Song, Nowlin, Jones, & Jenkins‐Smith, ; Song, ; Song, Silva, & Jenkins‐Smith, ; Thompson, Ellis, & Wildavsky, ; Tumlison, Moyer, & Song, ). By intersecting the dimensions of grid and group, CT can be used to conceptually classify individuals as one of four cultural types: egalitarian (low grid/high group), hierarch (high grid/high group), individualist (low grid/low group), and fatalist (high grid/low group).…”

Bureaucratic Accountability and Disaster Response: Why Did the Korea Coast Guard Fail in Its Rescue Mission During theSewolFerry Accident?

“…The first perspective focuses upon macro‐level institutional settings and political dynamics that surround disaster management organizations in the context of risk governance (Nohrstedt & Weible, ), which also offers knowledge about the organizational task environments within which the related organizations function and perform. Topics of previous studies rooted on this perspective include politics of risk and disaster (Boin et al, ; Jones & Song, ; Moyer & Song, ; Song, ; Song, Silva, & Jenkins‐Smith, ; Tumlison, Moyer, & Song, ), bureaucratic politics of crisis management (Preston & ‘t Hart, ), politics‐administration relations embedded into crisis episodes (Boin, McConnell, & 't Hart, ), and the role of representative institutions in crisis management (Stark, ), to list a few. Meanwhile, the second theoretical perspective emphasizes technical and managerial issues that many disaster management organizations are dealing with in their day‐to‐day practices (Hwang & Park, ; Sadiq, ; Stark, ; ‘t Hart & Sundelius, ).…”

Ideological Orientations, LGBT Contact, and Formation of LGBT Policy Position*

“…Despite this theoretical connection, however, empirical research has shown that most individuals are unable to utilize their ideology along this continuum to form their policy positions (Converse, 1964;Zaller, 1992). Instead, other factors have been argued to be necessary to bridge the connection between an individual's ideology and his/her policy positions, including the individual's political knowledge and expertise (Jost, Federico, and Napier, 2009;Zaller, 1992), cultural predispositions (Song, 2014;Song, Silva, and Jenkins-Smith, 2014), affective emotions (Moyer and Song, 2016), and overall motivation (Federico, 2009), as well as the general effects of factors such as trust (Tumlison, Moyer, and Song, 2017) and exposure to policy narratives (Jones and Song, 2014;Jorgensen, Song, and Jones, 2018). As a result, the effect of individuals' political ideology on their policy preference formation, as well as the means by which this effect can be potentially realized, is still being explored.…”