Coalitional Architecture of Climate Change Litigation Networks in the United States

Abstract Understanding how coalitions battle to advance or slow down regulatory efforts to address climate change is critical to assess the likelihood that regulatory approaches can succeed in curbing the emission of greenhouse gases. This requires a thorough examination of how coalitions form and are structured. We focus our analysis on the Obama administration's “Climate Action Plan,” aimed to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from the operation of oil and gas facilities, transportation, and electricity generation. We focus on coalitional behavior when actors litigate either in favor or against each of these rules and reconstruct the comprehensive network of stakeholder relations across court cases by recreating the network of cosigners of documents submitted during the litigation process. We identify two main coalitions of pro‐ and anti‐regulation actors and assess their coalitional strategies. We use descriptive statistics, baseline models, and community detection algorithms to explore participation patterns related to level of participation, cross‐regulation activity, clustering, and homophily based subcoalitions.