Formulating a Regulatory Stance: The Comparative Politics of E-Cigarette Regulation in Australia, Canada and New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Depending on who is asked, electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) are either the worst thing to happen to the fight against tobacco or a godsent technology that will dramatically improve public health. Unlike tobacco cigarettes, where the world has converged on common regulatory policies intent on shrinking the market for those deadly products, jurisdictions diverge immensely in their regulatory goals towards e-cigarettes. Illustratively, in March 2017, the government of New Zealand announced it would legalize the sale of e-cigarettes. In February 2017, Australia’s pharmaceutical regulator rejected a proposal to legalize the sale of nicotine for use in e-cigarettes because evidence of the product’s long-term safety was lacking. Previously, the medicines regulator in each country agreed the sale of e-cigarettes with nicotine should not be legal. Within a month, two wealthy, democratic, neighboring former British colonies, with a history of being leaders in tobacco control policy, led by right-wing governments, parted company on this momentous policy issue. Why? Through a comparative study of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, this study addresses how the concerns of public health advocates, business, bureaucrats, and politicians around e-cigarettes are translated into regulatory policy. Political science has only begun to apply its theories to the study of public health policies, and most of what drives public health policy outcomes remains poorly understood. Here, a qualitative comparative approach of three most-similar country cases is used to determine what factors enabled e-cigarette regulatory policy change or stasis. To imbue meaning to the purpose of a regulatory framework, the study introduces an organizing framework called a regulatory stance, which describes the intent of a regulatory framework to alter the size of a market in the future relative to the present. All three case countries began with a prohibitionist regulatory stance towards e-cigarettes, which intended the market for e-cigarettes should make up none of their economies. New Zealand and Canada soon adopted expansionist regulatory stances, meaning that these countries intended on growing the size of their e-cigarette markets. Australia kept its original regulatory stance. Structured by John W. Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Approach to agenda-setting, the case studies examine how and why a country’s regulatory stance towards e-cigarettes, changed or did not. I employed qualitative techniques of document collection and key informant interviews to piece together a comparative study of e-cigarette regulatory policy and politics. In the Multiple Streams Approach, the problem and policy streams must become primed before they can merge with the politics stream and open a policy window. The problem stream became primed once the current regulatory policy was deemed a failure when it was rejected by the courts as illegal, rejected by bureaucracies as not worth enforcing, or it failed to advance the fight against smoking. Next, the policy stream became primed once the public health policy community agreed on a consensus alternative regulatory stance expanding the market for e-cigarettes. Finally, the politics stream was primed when conditions in the problem and policy stream granted left-wing politicians’ permission to support a regulatory stance change favored by business groups. This freed right-wing politicians to support regulatory stance change without facing a political penalty. Once all stakeholders agreed they would benefit more by adopting the alternative regulatory stance than by continuing with the failed policy, a policy window to change the failed e-cigarette regulatory stance opened.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".