Industry Lobbying Research Articles

Tobacco Industry CSR activities in Poland between 2020-2023

Abstract Background The tobacco industry has undergone a significant transformation in its approach towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. Once primarily associated with controversy and criticism due to the health risks associated with tobacco consumption, many tobacco companies have begun to embrace CSR initiatives as a means to mitigate these concerns and demonstrate their commitment to broader societal well-being. Methods Methods were based on the Global Tobacco Industry Interference Index. Between 1 January 2020 and 31 March 2023 scoping review of legal basis, Polish media websites, Polish government and local government websites, also social media of tobacco industry companies has been done by four reviewers searching separately. Results Between 2020 and 2023 several tobacco companies supported public schools (organized workshops, offered internships, and demonstrated the production processes). In 2022, the National Revenue Administration signed an agreement with Philip Morris Polska, among other companies, under the Cooperation Program. The objective of the Program is to initiate collaborative measures that promote compliance with tax regulations. At the end of 2021, the National Revenue Administration took patronage over the Business Center Club social campaign entitled ‘Coming together to fight the illicit trade in tobacco products’. Moreover, in March 2023 the General Police Headquarters started cooperation with BAT and JTI in the field of combating illegal production and trade in tobacco products, as well as disclosing and eliminating tobacco products from illegal sources from economic circulation. Conclusions In Poland, which currently has no specific regulation constraining tobacco industry lobbying, implementation of the provisions of WHO FCTC Article 5.3 is needed to limit interactions between the government and the tobacco industry. Government and public schools should not accept any support from the tobacco industry. Key messages • The government should have regulatory measures to manage its interactions with the tobacco industry, emphasizing the importance of refraining from accepting industry assistance. • Implementation of WHO FCTC Article 5.3 of is needed to limit interactions between the government and the tobacco industry.

Balancing policy objectives: Cambodia's COVID‐19 emergency cash assistance scheme for workers

AbstractWelfare programs in emerging economies are, in most cases, highly selective. This article illustrates this point by exploring Cambodia's emergency cash assistance scheme coverage for workers affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing on policy analysis and interviews with government officials, industry representatives, and garment and tourism unions, it analyzes the level of benefit and efficacy of the initiative for different groups of workers. Based on this analysis, we find that garment factory and tourism workers received better support than workers in other sectors as a consequence of industry lobbying and strategic decision‐making on the part of the government designed to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on those sectors. Our analysis also reveals, however, that the relatively informal nature of even formal‐sector workplaces in Cambodia meant that the scheme's impact was highly varied even among these targeted groups of workers. We conclude with a discussion of the findings' broader implications.Related ArticlesAsongu, Simplice, and Nicholas M. Odhiambo. 2023. “The Effect of Inequality on Poverty and Severity of Poverty in Sub‐Saharan Africa: The Role of Financial Development Institutions.” Politics & Policy 51(5): 898–918. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12558.Lachapelle, Erick, Thomas Bergeron, Richard Nadeau, Jean‐François Daoust, Ruth Dassonneville, and Éric Bélanger. 2021. “Citizens' Willingness to Support New Taxes for COVID‐19 Measures and the Role of Trust.” Politics & Policy 49(3): 534–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12404.Onyango, Gedion, and Japheth Otieno Ondiek. 2022. “Open Innovation during the COVID‐19 Pandemic Policy Responses in South Africa and Kenya.” Politics & Policy 50(5): 1008–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12490.

Sugar‐Sweetened Beverages Taxation Plan in Indonesia: Call for Political Commitment

ABSTRACTIndonesia is grappling with a rise in obesity and diabetes, partially driven by a high consumption of sugar‐sweetened beverages. The prevalence of obesity among adults more than doubled from 2007 to 2018, and diabetes rates have also increased. In response, the Indonesian government has proposed an excise tax on sugar‐sweetened beverages to reduce consumption. However, the implementation of this policy has repeatedly been delayed, with the latest postponement to 2024. Sugar‐sweetened beverages contribute significantly to chronic diseases, increasing the healthcare burden and reducing economic productivity. Taxation, a widely used public health strategy in the form of fiscal measures, can decrease consumption by raising prices, raising public awareness, encouraging product reformulation, and generating revenue. Despite its potential benefits, the proposed tax in Indonesia faces substantial political and commercial challenges. The president‐elect Prabowo Subanto has not explicitly supported the tax in his political manifesto, raising concerns about further delays due to industry lobbying. Successful implementation of the tax requires robust political will, public and civil society pressure, and effective cross‐sector cooperation. The government must ensure clear policy goals, equal application to domestic and foreign products, and supportive measures such as providing free drinking water alternatives. Transparent stakeholder consultations can build broad‐based support, whereas effective monitoring and evaluation frameworks are essential for compliance. To gain public support, allocating tax revenues to public health and social programs is crucial. Although initial resistance is expected, strong enforcement mechanisms can ensure adherence. With determined political commitment and public advocacy, the sugar‐sweetened beverage tax can significantly reduce obesity and diabetes rates, improving public health outcomes and economic productivity in Indonesia. This commentary provides an overview of the proposed tax, explores its challenges, and offers recommendations for successful implementation.

Friends Don't Let Industry Lobbyists Drive Alcohol Policy at NIAAA: A Response to Wieczorek (2024).

Friends Don't Let Industry Lobbyists Drive Alcohol Policy at NIAAA: A Response to Wieczorek (2024).

Facing up to Problem Gambling: Tracing the Emergence of Facial Recognition Technology as a means of Enforcing Voluntary Self-Exclusion

AbstractComputer technology has long been touted as a means of increasing the effectiveness of voluntary self-exclusion schemes – especially in terms of relieving gaming venue staff of the task of manually identifying and verifying the status of new customers. This paper reports on the government-led implementation of facial recognition technology as part of an automated self-exclusion program in the city of Adelaide in South Australia—one of the first jurisdiction-wide enforcements of this controversial technology in small venue gambling. Drawing on stakeholder interviews, site visits and documentary analysis over a two year period, the paper contrasts initial claims that facial recognition offered a straightforward and benign improvement to the efficiency of the city’s long-running self-excluded gambler program, with subsequent concerns that the new technology was associated with heightened inconsistencies, inefficiencies and uncertainties. As such, the paper contends that regardless of the enthusiasms of government, tech industry and gaming lobby, facial recognition does not offer a ready ‘technical fix’ to problem gambling. The South Australian case illustrates how this technology does not appear to better address the core issues underpinning problem gambling, and/or substantially improve conditions for problem gamblers to refrain from gambling. As such, it is concluded that the gambling sector needs to pay close attention to the practical outcomes arising from initial cases such as this, and resist industry pressures for the wider replication of this technology in other jurisdictions.

Political influence on international climate agreements with border carbon adjustment

We study the influence of industrial lobbying on national climate policies and the formation of an international environmental agreement if the coalition countries use border carbon adjustments to protect domestic producers. We find that the effects of this political influence crucially depend on the distribution of carbon tax revenues. If these are transferred to the households, lobbying distorts carbon taxes downwards to reduce the tax burden and does not affect coalition sizes. This leads to higher emissions and lower welfare. By contrast, if tax revenues are given back to the firms, lobbies in the outsider countries favor carbon taxes, whereas lobbies in the coalition countries favor carbon subsidies to raise the international commodity price. This reduces the tax difference and the welfare difference between the countries, which reduces the free-rider incentives. Then, lobbying stabilizes the grand coalition and reduces global emissions compared to a “perfect” world without lobbying if the political influence is sufficiently strong.

From Marginalia to Bookends: Industrialization, Capitalism, and Advertising in Hungary’s Modern Literary Journal, <i>Nyugat</i> (1908–41)

This paper examines Nyugat [West], the premier journal of modern Hungarian literature published from 1908 to 1941 and edited by Ernő Osvát (1876–1929), Ignotus (1869–1949), and Miksa Fenyő (1877–1972) until 1917. Although Hungarian scholarship has detailed the role played by Osvát and Ignotus, Fenyő’s contribution to this triumvirate has received less attention, a lack that may have hindered literary historians’ understanding of the more widespread, sociological reasons underlying Nyugat’s long-lasting presence in a highly competitive book market. I argue that examining Fenyő’s editorial position demands the inclusion of marginalia, the term this study utilizes to denote the factory advertisements, banking-related notifications, military supply announcements, railway schedules, and eulogies that display Fenyő’s ties to the industrial lobby organization GyOSz — the National Association of Hungarian Industrialists, also referred to as ‘the Association’ — within the pages of a journal dedicated to promoting fin-de-siècle aestheticism. Exploring what Bernard Lahire would describe as Fenyő’s ‘double life’ thereby paves the way to theorizing what beliefs and ‘rules of the game’ (illusio) may have determined the connection between Hungary’s wealthiest industrialists and Nyugat during a period when the journal’s editors and authors sought to attain both authorial and financial autonomy.

Health in data space: Formative and experiential dimensions of cross-border health data sharing

Healthcare is increasingly datafied, and a wide range of actors—patients, clinicians, administrators, policymakers, and industry lobbyists—want to be able to exchange and access health data internationally and use them for an increasing number of purposes. Therefore, competing initiatives aimed at fostering international data integration proliferate, with the proposed European Health Data Space as one of the most prominent examples. But how do legislators conceptualize a health data space? And what could they gain from rethinking the governmental object of this legislation? To explore these questions, we suggest taking the term “data space,” present in the European Health Data Space initiative, and develop it theoretically to establish a vocabulary fit for understanding international data-intensive health environments. Space is a concept with appealing affordances. It is a way of naming a mode of being which is simultaneously symbolic and material, abstract and concrete, social and physical. We show how these affordances of the concept of space can be helpful when exploring new ways of living in cross-border data-intensive healthcare settings. Whereas policy reports often describe data sharing as a matter of providing technical means and legal provisions to “wire together” existing data resources, we argue that data spaces should be understood as sociotechnical constructs enacted through three formative and four experiential dimensions.

The Perils of Partnership: Interactions Between Public Health England, Drinkaware, and the Portman Group Surrounding the Drink Free Days Campaign.

There is growing evidence that the alcohol industry seeks to obstruct public health policies that might affect future alcohol sales. In parallel, the alcohol industry funds organisations that engage in "responsible drinking" campaigns. Evidence is growing that the content and delivery of such campaigns serves industry, rather than public health interests, yet these organizations continue to be the subject of partnerships with government health departments. This study aimed to examine the nature and potential impacts of such partnerships by analysing the practices of the alcohol industry-funded charity Drinkaware during the establishment of the Drink Free Days campaign. A case study based on an inductive analysis of documents revealed by freedom of information (FoI) request regarding communications between Drinkaware, Public Health England (PHE), and the Portman Group, in the years running up to, and during, the Drink Free Days campaign, a partnership between alcohol industry-funded charity Drinkware, and PHE. This study reveals a range of less visible, system-level effects of such partnerships for government departments and civil society. The tensions observed, as exhibited by discrepancies between internal and external communications, the emphasis on managing and mitigating the perception of negative consequences, and the links to wider alcohol industry initiatives and bodies, suggest the need for wider considerations of organizational conflicts of interest, and of possible indirect, harmful consequences to policy-making. These include the marginalization of other civil society voices, the displacing of more effective policy options, and strategic alignment with other industry lobbying activities. The findings have implications for how public health practitioners and health organisations might better weigh the potential trade-offs of partnership in the context of health promotion campaigns.

How tobacco companies use the revolving door between government and industry to influence policymaking: an Australian case study.

Mixed-methods including non-experimental descriptive and exploratory case studies. To build a picture of tobacco lobbying through the revolving door in Australia, data was triangulated from multiple publicly available sources: 1) Australian federal, state and territory government lobbyist registers, 2) the online social networking platform, LinkedIn; and 3) Australian news media reports. Tobacco companies lobby the Australian government using 'in-house' employees, lobbyists working in firms acting on their behalf, and third-party allies with common interests. Almost half (48%) of internal tobacco company lobbyists had held positions in the Australian government (state, territory and/or federal) before or after working in the tobacco industry. Likewise, 55% of lobbyists acting on behalf of tobacco companies had held government positions before or after working as a lobbyist. In-house tobacco industry lobbyists, as well as those working on behalf of tobacco companies within lobbying firms, were found to have held senior governmental positions, such as a Member of Parliament (MP) or Senator, chief or deputy chief of staff, or senior advisor in a ministerial office, and many had moved into or out of government within 1 year of working for a tobacco company (56%) or as a lobbyist (48%). Tobacco companies are strategically using the revolving door between the government and the tobacco industry as a key political lobbying mechanism to try to influence public health policy in Australia.

Taxation at a Distance

Wealthy Americans escape the income and estate taxes by holding assets at a legal remove. This general tax avoidance strategy—holding wealth “at a distance”—takes several forms, but the most powerful of all is the use of life insurance. Tax law has come to afford special treatment to life insurance due to some combination of reasoned policy, industry lobbying, and illogical application of existing tax rules and judicial anti-abuse doctrines. Courts have only recently begun to push back against taxpayers’ use of life insurance as a tax-free brokerage account, but the judicial crackdown is fatally flawed. This is because it rests on what I call “control doctrines,” or arguments that taxpayers should only become liable for paying taxes on their life insurance investments when they exercise direct, personal control over those investments. But I argue that taxpayers can benefit from such arrangements without exercising any control, and that economic benefit is a more appropriate basis for tax liability. I show that applying an economic benefit principle would produce simple, administrable rules superior to the control-based status quo in both the income tax and estate tax settings. My argument demonstrates that tax law must reject extreme legal formalism—such as the legal “distance” created through life insurance and trusts—in order to meet the challenge of high-wealth exceptionalism.

Why are international standards not set? Explaining “weak” cases in shadow banking regulation

AbstractWhy are international regulatory standards not set? While most of the literature focuses on explaining positive cases of standard-setting where international rules are agreed upon, weak or negative cases remain prevalent and yet surprisingly under-explored. To explain these cases in the area of financial services, we integrate an inter-state explanation, which focuses on competition between major jurisdictions, with a transgovernmental explanation, which relates to conflict between different regulatory bodies at the international level. We also consider how these dimensions interact with financial industry lobbying. This allows us to construct a typology differentiating between distinct types of cases concerning international standard-setting: (1) absent standards, (2) non-agreed standards, (3) symbolic standards, and (4) agreed standards. The explanatory leverage of our approach is illustrated through a systematic structured focused comparison of four post-crisis cases related to “shadow banking.” The article generates novel insights into regulatory conflicts and the scope conditions for international agreement.

Development of a framework for action to advocate for a coherent prevention policy for tobacco, alcohol, and foods high in fats, salt, or sugar: a mixed-methods approach

BackgroundTobacco, alcohol, and foods high in fats, salt, or sugar (HFSS) are health harming products. Limited progress in prevention is partly due to health-harming industry lobbying. Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), Alcohol Health Alliance, and Obesity Health Alliance collaborated with the aim of developing a framework for action to address the saturation of these products in our environment. MethodsWe used a mixed-methods approach. Focus groups with academic experts, local government, and national government, recruited through snowball sampling were held in Nov 3, 2022 (14 participants); April 25, 2023 (20 participants); and June 15, 2023 (20 participants). Iteratively, data analysis was presented, and key themes tested. Commissioned economic analysis of national survey datasets quantified consumer spend on tobacco, alcohol, and food products above government recommendations (all tobacco use, >14 units of alcohol, and national dietary guidelines) and industry percentage of revenues (net of tax). Public opinion data from the ASH YouGov Smokefree Survey 2022 on a nationally representative sample of 13 088 adults were descriptively analysed for specific policy options. FindingsThe framework for action to achieve a coherent prevention approach across products included three key enablers (secure funding for prevention, a comprehensive strategy, and protecting health policy from industry interference). Five key actions were: regulate advertising to limit harm, regulate product use and environments they can be used in, promote healthy messaging, raise the price of health-harming products, and fund treatment services. Economic analysis identified 100% of tobacco usage, 43·4% of alcohol purchased, and 28·8% of food purchased by households was above government recommendations. Post-tax industry revenue was £7·3 billion for tobacco, £11·2 billion for alcohol, and £34·2 billion for HFSS foods. Strong public support for levies (5%, n=8495) and protecting health policy from industry influence (69%, n=9006) was apparent. InterpretationA coherent approach to prevention across health-harming products is effective and has public support. Strengths include the iterative process to develop the framework for action among focus groups and use of nationally representative datasets. Limitations include the snowball sampling. The findings were built into a strategy intended to inform future collaborative work in the area. FundingCancer Research UK (grant PICADV-Feb22\\100004).

Lobbying by omission: what is known and unknown about harmful industry lobbyists in Australia.

What is unknown about commercial lobbying is far greater than what is known. These omissions distort our understanding of the extent and nature of business influence on politics. Especially when businesses engage in practices that harm health, it is crucial for public health advocates to understand corporate lobbying to counter its influence. Our study proceeded in three phases. First, based on an international audit, we developed a list of the categories of information about lobbying that could be disclosed under four groups (lobby firms, lobbyists, organizations and activities) and benchmarked Australian lobbyist registers against this list. Second, we manually extracted data from lobbyist registers in eight jurisdictions, cleaned the data and created a relational model for analysis. Finally, we classified a sample of organizations as public health organizations or harmful industries to compare their activities. We identified 61 possible categories of information about lobbying in international lobbyist registers. When applied to Australian lobbyist registers, Queensland covered the widest range of categories (13, 21%), though many lacked detail and completeness. Australian lobbyist registers provided data on 462 third-party lobby firms across Australia, currently employing 1036 lobbyists and representing 4101 organizations. Several of these represented harmful industries, with gambling interests hiring the most third-party lobby firms. Ultimately, Australian lobbyist registers do not provide enough information to understand the full extent of lobbying activities taking place. Political transparency is important for public health actors to be able to monitor corporate political activity and to protect policy-making from vested interests.

Incentivisation practices and their influence on physicians' prescriptions: A qualitative analysis of practice and policy in Pakistan.

Focus on profit-generating enterprise in healthcare can create conflicts of interest that adversely impact prescribing and pricing of medicines. Although a global challenge, addressing the impacts on quality of care is particularly difficult in countries where the pharmaceutical industry and physician lobby is strong relative to regulatory institutions. Our study characterises the range of incentives exchanged between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians, and investigates the differences between incentivisation practices and policies in Pakistan. In this mixed methods study, we first thematically analysed semi-structured interviews with 28 purposively selected for-profit primary-care physicians and 13 medical sales representatives from pharmaceutical companies working across Pakistan's largest city, Karachi. We then conducted a content analysis of policies on ethical practice issued by two regulatory bodies responsible in Pakistan, and the World Health Organization. This enabled a systematic comparison of incentivisation practices with what is considered 'prohibitive' or 'permissive' in policy. Our findings demonstrate that incentivisation of physicians to meet pharmaceutical sales targets is the norm, and that both parties play in the symbiotic physician-pharma incentivisation dynamics. Further, we were able to categorise the types of incentive exchanged into one of five categories: financial, material, professional or educational, social or recreational, and familial. Our comparison of incentivisation practices with policies revealed three reasons for such widespread incentivisation linked to sales targets: first, some clear policies were being ignored by physicians; second, there are ambiguous or contradictory policies with respect to specific incentive types; and third, numerous incentive types are unaddressed by existing policies, such as pharmaceutical companies paying for private clinic renovations. There is a need for policies to be clarified and updated, and to build buy-in for policy enforcement from pharmaceutical companies and physicians, such that transgressions on target-driven prescribing are seen to be unethical.

Integrative literature review: Ethylene oxide exposure signs and symptoms.

Although ethylene oxide (EtO) gas is designated as a human carcinogen, extant literature reports mixed findings on the health effects of exposure. The disparate findings may reflect industry bias as many studies were funded by a large chemical industry lobby. To conduct an integrative review of studies free from industry bias to facilitate compilation of a comprehensive list of reported signs and symptoms of EtO exposure. We reviewed 1887 papers of which 42 articles met inclusion criteria. The authors conducted this review in accordance with PRISMA guidelines. The presence of bias was assessed using Joanna Briggs Institute checklists. Non-industry biased literature confirmed serious adverse health effects associated with EtO exposure at the occupational, hospital, and community level. EtO represents a carcinogen, neurotoxin, and respiratory irritant. After removal of industry-biased studies, EtO was unequivocally found to pose a threat to human health. There remains a gap in the number of studies examining community-level exposure, which is essential to understanding the impact of EtO. Given that EtO-emitting facilities are concentrated in diverse and disadvantaged communities, further study of EtO exposure health effects is warranted to inform public policy on toxic air emissions.

Cigarette électronique et fertilité : vrais ou faux amis ?

While electronic cigarettes have been on the rise in France for the past ten years, data on their prevalence, use patterns and safety have remained fragmented and controversial. Electronic cigarettes seem to not be a harmless product to use, because although they contain fewer harmful substances than traditional cigarettes, they still contain toxic products such as endocrine disruptors, which appear to have a negative impact on hormonal homeostasis, morphology and functioning of the animal reproductive system. Mostly presented as a harmless alternative to traditional cigarettes by industry lobbies, electronic cigarettes are often offered as an aid to smoking cessation in the same way as nicotinic substitutes. This strategy is especially proposed without knowledge of its effects on human reproductive health. Indeed, there are currently very few scientific publications, which study the impact of the use of electronic cigarettes, nicotine and the vapours it delivers on fertility and the functioning of the human female and male reproductive systems. Thus, the great majority of the data we have to date come from studies carried out in animal populations and show that electronic cigarettes exposure affect fertility. There is, to our knowledge, no scientific publication on the results in Assisted Reproductive Technology in case of use of electronic cigarettes, motivating the realization of the study IVF-VAP currently underway in the department of Medicine and Biology of Reproduction of the Amiens Picardie University Hospital.

Regaining Control of the National Security Establishment

To justify its enormous cost, the defense sector promotes China as a deadly military threat, noneother being available This is a potentially fatal error. The Biden administration should recognize China’s sphere of influence and strengthen control over the national security establishment. Like all other government agencies, the national security agencies fight relentlessly to defend their programs, prerogatives and budgets. To that end, they use the world’s largest public relations budget, a flotilla of supporting think tanks, associations, institutes and columnists, and an army of defense industry lobbyists. Despite having never clearly won a war since World War II (not counting the farcical invasion of Grenada) and having clearly lost at least two despite a seemingly overwhelming advantage of force (Vietnam, Afghanistan and arguably Iraq), the military nonetheless has been so spectacularly successful in its political mission that we now spend more on the military than do all other countries combined – an incredible eight hundred and sixteen billion dollars per year.

Political Education "in the Belly of the Monster": The Third World Women's Alliance's "Tuesday Schedule"

Political Education "in the Belly of the Monster":The Third World Women's Alliance's "Tuesday Schedule" Vani Kannan (bio) The back cover of the Third World Women's Alliance's first issue of Triple Jeopardy introduces readers to the group's "Tuesday Schedule" of political education events, held weekly at 346 West Twentieth Street, New York, and starting at "7:30 sharp." Topics covered in political education sessions included a broad range of domestic and international issues: hospital working conditions and management-labor relations; "bourgeois and revolutionary attitudes" toward love and sex; a critical introduction to nutrition focusing on the food industry, additives, and food lobbies; a film screening and discussion on the anti-war movement; guerrilla theater skits on Third World women and the war; and a discussion of Third World people in anti-war demonstrations. Every other week, the sessions were open to men. This first "Tuesday Schedule" demonstrates how the Alliance's political objectives and anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist framing deconstruct the local/global binary and refuse to draw stark divides between different scales of struggle. A critique of capitalist labor relations in the U.S. flows seamlessly into a larger discussion of the war in Vietnam; a discussion of intimate partner relations moves into a critique of the corporatization of food. The articles in the first issue of the paper demonstrate the group's adeptness at fleshing out the material interconnections among these scales: articles transport the reader from the perspectives of incarcerated revolutionaries in the U.S., to surveillance on public transportation, to a demonstration for universal day care, to the Vietnam War, to reproductive justice, to book reviews, poetry, and first-person interviews with women workers. Protest report-backs highlight the vibrant cross-section of New York City organizing that comprised the Alliance's political community. This first issue of the paper also offers a public report-back on the group's internal work, [End Page 185] principles, and philosophy of organizing, demonstrating a commitment to transparency with its base. The paper was understood as the Alliance's official news organ. As Linda Burnham puts it, the intention of the paper was as follows: to really speak to the ways in which women of color experience the world, and speak to the issues that were not at that time being addressed by the white women's movement, or the mainstream women's movement. And it was the early side of the recognition that women of color faced issues and discrimination and marginalization, not only as women, but as people of color, as people with particular class background, et cetera. (2005, 20) Triple Jeopardy was directed toward an audience of Third World working-class women and men, and an internal criticism of the early papers addresses the need to refine this audience further to "the unpolitical sister," rather than those who were already connected to political struggles ("Dear Cheryl" 1972). The paper's editorial staff were entirely volunteer, and in early issues of the paper like this one, bylines were typically not attributed to individual authors; collective authorship served as a method of protecting members from state surveillance (Romney 2021, 109). The Alliance maintained a principled stance of not including advertisements in the paper. For example, the Alliance received a letter from someone conducting a study on survivors of sexual assault who asked whether they could advertise in TJ, and the Alliance said no, redirecting them to the group Bay Area Women Against Rape ("Dear Friend" 1973, 1). Because Triple Jeopardy was understood to be deeply connected with the Alliance's political organizing and organization-building goals, anyone who expressed interest in joining the paper was asked to join the organization itself. Frances Beal saw writing and organizing as inextricable, and "thought knowing the Alliance and being part of its activity were necessary prerequisites to writing for the paper" (Romney 2021, 108). For the Alliance, writing was embedded in organizational work, rather than existing alone or adjacent to grassroots organizing. For those of us who are writers, teach writing, or are otherwise engaged in the study and practice of composition as political work, this insight is essential; when engaging with Triple Jeopardy...

Regulatory capture’s third face of power

AbstractThe term ‘regulatory capture’ is frequently invoked to describe dysfunctional government institutions. In its casual use, it refers to a phenomenon in which regulations benefit regulated industries, rather than public interests. However, as an analytical concept, social scientists have struggled to empirically identify and define the processes in which capture emerges and sustains. In this article, I outline a cultural framework for regulatory capture by linking cultural sociology and the faces of power to existing capture theory. Through an ethnographic case study of digital trade provisions in international trade agreements, I show how capture occurs through the construction and manipulation of ‘public interests’. I trace how capture (a) emerges when industry lobbyists extend existing schemas of a policy network into new frames and (b) is institutionalized into regulatory agencies when policymakers adopt and enact these frames into knowledge production and law. Thus, capture appears through a veneer of consensus, which suppresses alternative interests and policy outcomes.