Overcoming Special Interests in the Adoption of Policy: Tobacco Control, Health Insurance Regulation, and Gun Control

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Considering History in the Study of Movements

Abstract

At a time when public health and science is under attack, practitioners in public health frequently receive little to no training on how to navigate the politics of public health when they attend schools of public health. While students receive training in biostatistics and epidemiology, few courses actually aim to build explicit knowledge of politics, despite the fact that it’s widely understood that the best technical solutions don’t matter without an understanding of politics. With political scientist Rick Doner of Emory University, I am currently writing a guide for students in schools of public health aimed at providing this critical knowledge that is currently missing in the training of health professionals.

At ASA I would plan to present our chapter on navigating the politics of policy adoption. The chapter contains three sets of comparative cases: a first discussing the politics of three different tobacco control in the U.S. and China. The two cases are obviously quite different, which we believe provides value in helping practitioners who work in contexts that may share similar scope conditions with the different cases to think through how the cases might relate to their own cases. A second set of cases we will take up in the chapter explores the politics of policy adoption related to private health insurance regulation. Here, we center two cases that bear some similarities in certain respects in Thailand and Brazil, but show how different decisions in these two cases led to two very different contemporary realities. A final set of cases examines the politics of gun regulation, putting the power of the gun lobby in the United States into perspective with other cases to surface alternative gun regulation policies and tactics that gun control proponents might successfully draw on.

Author

• Joseph A. Harris, Boston University