Rogan Kersh

Context: The continuing rise in obesity rates across the United States has proved impervious to clinical treatment or public health exhortation, necessitating policy responses. Nearly a decade's worth of political debates may be hardening into an obesity issue regime, comprising established sets of cognitive frames, stakeholders, and policy options.

Methods: This article is a survey of reports on recently published studies.

Findings: Much of the political discussion regarding obesity is centered on two "frames," personal-responsibility and environmental, yielding very different sets of policy responses. While policy efforts at the federal level have resulted in little action to date, state and/or local solutions such as calorie menu labeling and the expansion of regulations to reduce unhealthy foods at school may have more impact.

Conclusions: Obesity politics is evolving toward a relatively stable state of equilibrium, which could make comprehensive reforms to limit rising obesity rates less feasible. Therefore, to achieve meaningful change, rapid-response research identifying a set of promising reforms, combined with concerted lobbying action, will be necessary.

Obesity burst onto the U.S. national policy agenda in 2000/2001, initially fuelled by a widely disseminated set of maps by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) depicting sharply rising obesity rates nationwide, followed by the surgeon general's warning that obesity had become a "new national epidemic" (Mokdad et al. 2003; Oliver 2006; Satcher 2001). A snapshot of responses since then would include alarmed reactions from medical, media, and policy actors alike. The health establishment has rushed to devise medical treatments, from surgical to pharmaceutical, for obesity and its manifold health effects. Surging media attention to obesity and overweight features reports ranging from dire health alarms ("the current generation may be the first to live shorter lives than their parents-and obesity is to blame"; Belluck 2005, p. A1; see also Daniels 2006; Olshansky et al. 2005) to economic warnings (over $120 billion lost annually to obesity-related illnesses; see e.g., Bhattacharya and Sood 2006) to "lifestyle" stories of coffins, airplane seats, and hospital beds all made larger to suit the "supersizing of America" (St. John 2003, p. A13). Public officials at all levels have decried the "epidemic," although statutory reforms have been concentrated in a few energetic local and state polities; the federal government has been noticeably slow to act. All the while obesity rates continue to rise, with thirty-seven states reporting significant year-to-year increases from 2007 to 2008, with none reporting a decrease (TFAH 2008).

This article explores obesity politics as it has evolved in recent years. First I discuss the sustained struggles over framing the topic now that public agendas have begun to solidify into an "issue regime" around obesity. Then I examine popular local and state policy options and review approaches that could have an impact on soaring obesity rates, along with an assessment of the likelihood of their widespread adoption. While promising policy approaches exist, the opportunity to take action may be closing fast. On most public health issues, policymaking features a bustle of activity followed by a period of quiescence as a regime coalesces-even when the underlying problems continue to mount. Antiobesity advocates who face declining interest from lawmakers will therefore need to devise creative ways to sustain a focus on this topic.

The continuing rise in obesity rates across the United States has proved impervious to clinical treatment or public health exhortation, necessitating policy responses. Nearly a decade’s worth of political debates may be hardening into an obesity issue regime, comprising established sets of cognitive frames, stakeholders, and policy options.

Research on childhood obesity has primarily been conducted by experts in nutrition, psychology, and medicine. Only recently have public policy scholars devoted serious work to this burgeoning public health crisis. Here the authors advance that research by surveying national experts in health/nutrition and health policy on the public health impact and the political feasibility of fifty-one federal policy options for addressing childhood obesity. Policies that were viewed as politically infeasible but having a great impact on childhood obesity emphasized outright bans on certain activities. In contrast, education and information dissemination policies were viewed as having the potential to receive a favorable hearing from national policy makers but little potential public health impact. Both nutrition and policy experts believed that increasing funding for research would be beneficial and politically feasible. A central need for the field is to develop the means to make high-impact policies more politically feasible.

In his essay “All Community Is Local,” political scientist William Schambra urges that researchers and activists “direct our gaze away from the failed project of national community and focus once again on the churches, voluntary associations, and grass-roots groups that are rebuilding America’s civil society one family, one block, one neighborhood at a time.” Schambra’s is a rather extreme version of a view expressed by many theorists of citizenship, as well as by political figures from both right and left: that the nation is too distant from most people’s lives (or its governing officials too impersonal or corrupt) to inspire a sense of shared purposes or civic spirit. Only intense local involvement yields rightly-constituted citizens, and small communities are the likeliest realm for realizing the public good.[1]

New York State, because of its great diversity, has more extensive social and political conflict than most states. Governing New York State: Fifth Edition provides expert assessment of how these conflicts are organized and represented, and how the political process and political institutions work to seek to resolve them. This newly updated fifth edition contains significantly revised material and covers more topics than the prior edition.

The contributors examine conflicts between New York City and the rest of the state, and between federal, state, and local governments. The role of major political parties in organizing and representing broad coalitions of different groups is reviewed, along with the role of third parties, interest groups, and the media. Political institutions that shape the political process-the governor, the legislature, the courts, and the public authorities-are discussed, along with how these institutions affect the representation of responsiveness of various groups. Finally, Governing New York State investigates the major policy areas of the state: the economy, taxes, local education, higher education, health care, welfare, transportation, and the environment.

The fourth edition of Health Politics and Policy examines the political arena in which United States health care policies are made, and provides a framework for understanding how the process works. This book conveys the excitement of health care politics and covers the issues facing the American health care system. Factors that shape health policy are discussed in detail, including values, private players, and government, as well as the resulting dynamic of these forces. A comparison of the U.S. system to others offers a foundation for understanding our system within an international context.

Dividing American history into discrete periods dates to the first European colonists in North America, several of whom variously declared their region or colony to represent a "new beginning" a "new land of Canaan," a New England, and so forth: "in the New World is born a new history," as one early sermonizer had it. (1) Soon thereafter clerics and political leaders (often the same people) lamented their fellows' fall from grace; the dichotomy of golden age and descent into depravity, of Awakening and backsliding, has been an American motif ever since. Eventually, the sweep of U.S. history was sorted on a chronological, rather than theological or eschatological, basis. For well over a century political historians have in the main hewn to a familiar temporal script.

Among the principal targets of criticism in recent American politics has been the alleged corruption, inequity, overall cost, and regulatory complexity of the U.S. campaign-finance system. Scholarship has not borne out any of these criticisms, and, if anything, empirical investigation suggests that the current system does a fair job in addressing�as much as this is possible under modern conditions�the problem of public ignorance in mass democracies.

Interest Group Politics presents a broad spectrum of scholarship on interest groups past and present. In a time of partisan parity, when control of Congress is always within reach of the minority party at the next election, interest groups have every incentive to keep the pressure on. And they do. But the imbalance of influence that tilts toward moneyed interests is one of the cornerstones of the political system.

What does this mean for equal representation? In nineteen chapters, noted political scientists explore the role of money, technology, grassroots lobbying, issue advocacy advertising, and much more in interest group influence. Students will learn how the National Rifle Association has become one of the most effective lobbying groups in America, what opportunities the openness of the American political process has offered ethnic groups both within and outside the United States, how the role of interest groups in elections has changed (including 527's), what effect religious organizations had in the 2004 elections, and how interest groups affect Supreme Court nominations.

The much-noted decline of state autonomy theories owes partly to external challenges to state power, such as globalization, supranational regimes, and the like. But advanced democratic states have also long been seen as threatened from within, especially by powerful private interest groups.The extent of private-interest influence on policy making depends in important part on corporate lobbyists, a group whose activities are chronicled in this essay. Lobbyists exercise considerably more autonomy from the private clients who hire them than has previously been acknowledged. This portrait ultimately suggests that the national state and civil society may be mutually supportive rather than strictly separate spheres.

How to secure an adequate measure of unity among citizens in a liberal democratic state? Versions of this question formed the brunt of communitarian critiques of liberalism over the past two decades. Most liberal respondents took aim in return at communitarians' own vision of a healthy political society, while others emphasized the shared values or purposes indigenous to the liberal tradition. Yet as the liberal/communitarian debate dissolves into a common center, it appears that this immense body of theoretical exchanges has left the problem of national union no closer to solution. Liberal theorists now affirm this issue's centrality; as Will Kymlicka writes, "[i]dentifying the bases of social unity in multinational states is... one of the most pressing tasks facing liberals today." Meanwhile, communitarians like Michael Sandel have come to acknowledge the importance of a national, not only neighborhood, sense of mutual trust and solidarity. But no coherent principled or practical unionist design has emerged from the two sides' convergence.