Timescapes in Public Health Policy: Tobacco Control in Comparative Perspective

Few studies have examined tobacco policy over time. Change over time, especially in the medium and long-term, is not an emphasis in largely synchronic Public Health studies, and most Political Science analyses subsume temporality, sequencing events and specific policies without attempting to consider time as either an independent or dependent variable in its own right. Similarly, few studies have analyzed the “timescape” of tobacco control policy across countries, including timing (when), sequencing (order), scope (breadth, coverage), mode (amount, strength), tempo (speed, pace), trajectory (reversibility), and duration (range of time). Thus it is high time to take time seriously as an important dimension in tobacco policy in Western democracies, especially as it is now over a half century since the first widely-accepted scientific evidence of the health hazards of smoking were produced. After a period of policy hesitancy, eventually, beginning in the 1980s policy began to change significantly across these countries. Broadly, smoking has moved from normal to denormalized, and the dominant policy framing has changed from economic benefits to public health/morality dangers. This paper will consider timing, sequencing, temporal mode, speed, trajectory, and duration of tobacco-related policies across approximately 20 Western democracies over the past century in an attempt to develop a timescape of change in tobacco policy, principally values, instruments, and systemic change, that will help explain what has happened in a comparative, theoretical framework. This will include sources of variation, resistance, and convergence in policies across jurisdictions. Using these time dimensions as independent variables, the overall questions to be answered are: (1) How much overall change has occurred? (2) What are the sources of variation in the timescape of tobacco control across Western democracies? (3) Does the timescape of tobacco control policy rely more on ideas, interests, or institutions to explain policy change? (4) Which explanations of policy change offer the best purchase on policy change in tobacco policy? Answers to these questions will allow a more comprehensive, time-sensitive analysis of this long and relatively slowly-developing policy change.