Issue Framing and US State Energy and Climate Policy Choice

Experimental and case study research has highlighted the importance of issue framing to the adoption of state renewable energy and climate change policies. Yet this relationship has not been tested within broader models of state policy adoption. We fill this gap by exploring the relationship between issue-framing patterns and climate/renewable energy policy activity across the 50 U.S. states, controlling for other well-known determinants of state environmental policy choice. Our results confirm that framing patterns for these issues vary markedly between states and regions and that a higher proportion of frames highlighting the economic benefits of climate change and renewable energy policies is positively associated with state policy activity. These results further confirm the importance of new issue frames related to economic benefits in subnational climate and renewable energy politics.