The Policy Dystopia Model:an interpretive analysis of tobacco industry political activity

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Tobacco industry interference has been identified as the greatest obstacle to the implementation of evidence-based measures to reduce tobacco use. Understanding and addressing industry interference in public health policy-making is therefore crucial. Existing conceptualisations of corporate political activity (CPA) are embedded in a business perspective and do not attend to CPA's social and public health costs; most have not drawn on the unique resource represented by internal tobacco industry documents. Building on this literature, including systematic reviews, we develop a critically informed conceptual model of tobacco industry political activity. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We thematically analysed published papers included in two systematic reviews examining tobacco industry influence on taxation and marketing of tobacco; we included 45 of 46 papers in the former category and 20 of 48 papers in the latter (n = 65). We used a grounded theory approach to build taxonomies of "discursive" (argument-based) and "instrumental" (action-based) industry strategies and from these devised the Policy Dystopia Model, which shows that the industry, working through different constituencies, constructs a metanarrative to argue that proposed policies will lead to a dysfunctional future of policy failure and widely dispersed adverse social and economic consequences. Simultaneously, it uses diverse, interlocking insider and outsider instrumental strategies to disseminate this narrative and enhance its persuasiveness in order to secure its preferred policy outcomes. Limitations are that many papers were historical (some dating back to the 1970s) and focused on high-income regions. CONCLUSIONS: The model provides an evidence-based, accessible way of understanding diverse corporate political strategies. It should enable public health actors and officials to preempt these strategies and develop realistic assessments of the industry's claims.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002125
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Sociology and Policy
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Centre for Critical Inquiry into Society and Culture (CCISC)
Additional Information: © 2016 Ulucanlar et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Biotechnology,Biochemistry,Molecular Biology,Cell Biology
Publication ISSN: 1549-1676
Last Modified: 25 Mar 2024 08:19
Date Deposited: 11 Oct 2016 07:45
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://journal ... al.pmed.1002125 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2016-09-20
Accepted Date: 2016-08-08
Submitted Date: 2016-05-26
Authors: Ulucanlar, Selda
Fooks, Gary J. (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-0080-4802)
Gilmore, Anna B.

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License: Creative Commons Attribution


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