Scott Robinson, ISTPP Fellow, presented a paper co-authored with ISTPP Director, Arnold Vedlitz, at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association in Chicago, IL on August 29, 2013.
Their paper, “Organizational Trust and Risk Communication: Trust in the EPA and Opposition to Fracking,” explores how trust in a particular government institution, rather than government as a whole, contributes to the public’s acceptance of policy formation. Respondents to a national public survey were presented with one of three randomized risk scenarios about fracking delivered by one of three randomized messengers, including the EPA. After analyzing the resulting data, the authors determined that the treatment for risk intensity significantly predicted support for fracking, while the identity of the messenger did not.
The data for this research came from a 2012 national public energy survey supported by Texas A&M University’s Crisman Institute for Petroleum Research in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, ISTPP, and the Office of the Vice President for Research.