Scholars have spent decades arguing that policy entrepreneurs, change agents who work individually and in groups to influence the policy process, can be crucial in introducing policy innovation and spurring policy change. How to identify policy entrepreneurs empirically has received less attention. This oversight is consequential because scholars trying to understand when policy entrepreneurs emerge, and why, and what makes them more or less successful, need to be able to identify these change agents reliably and accurately. This paper explores the ways policy entrepreneurs are currently identified and highlights issues with current approaches. We introduce a new technique for eliciting and distinguishing policy entrepreneurs, coupling automated and manual analysis of local news media and a survey of policy entrepreneur candidates. We apply this technique to the empirical case of unconventional oil and gas drilling in Pennsylvania and derive some tentative results concerning factors which increase entrepreneurial efficacy.

几十年来，学者们一直认为，政策企业家、以个人和团体方式影响政策进程的变革推动者，对于引入政策创新和刺激政策变革至关重要。如何从经验上识别政策企业家却受到较少的关注。这种监督是很重要的，因为试图了解政策企业家何时出现、为何出现、以及是什么让他们或多或少成功的学者需要能够可靠而准确地识别这些变革推动者。本文探讨了目前确定政策企业家的方式，并强调了当前方法的问题。我们引入了一种用于引导和区分政策企业家的新技术，将当地新闻媒体的自动和手动分析与对政策企业家候选人的调查相结合。我们将这种技术应用于宾夕法尼亚州非常规石油和天然气钻探的经验案例，并得出了一些关于提高创业效率的因素的初步结果。