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Policies relevant to many key sociological processes are often subnational, enacted at the regional, state/provincial, and/or local levels. This applies notably in the politics of the environmental state, where public and private subnational environmental policies (SNEPs) have major consequences for managing climate change, addressing environmental injustices, regulating land uses, greening energy markets, limiting pollution, and much more. While sociologists focus more on national policies, diverse sociological contributions emphasize the importance of SNEPs and their origins, diffusion, implementation, and sources of backlash. We begin by providing a typology of SNEPs. Next, we highlight not only environmental sociology (with its particular attention to climate change and energy) but also the sociologies of social movements, politics, the economy, science, risk, and organizations, which have each offered unique perspectives. Finally, we outline an agenda for how sociologists can further elaborate a distinctive perspective that highlights inequality, valuation, diffusion, scale shifts, and venue-shopping up to national and global policy systems.

Abstract: Scholarship has recognized that contention shapes impression management efforts by business actors but has largely ignored how geographic factors affect industry-level responses and how industry groups may seek advantage based on the protests they face. This is consequential: against intuition, industry groups may respond more robustly to relatively more distant challenges than to ones proximate to their infrastructure, hoping to use this to their benefit. They do this because modestly further-away challenges can be framed as coming from “outsiders” making not-in-your-backyard claims, against claimed support in proximate communities. Using structural topic models, we examine daily communications by two major industry groups supporting hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) between 2009 and 2019: one more transgressive, one more conventional. We examine how their communications shifted after both proximate and non-proximate antifracking contention (protests and bans). We find that they respond only to relatively more distant contention: the transgressive group boosts distant opponents seeking to delegitimize them, while the conventional group highlights economic benefits. Further, reflecting political partisanship, both associations respond only to distant contention emerging from politically liberal areas, ignoring similar contention in conservative areas. We discuss implications for theories of social movements, organizations, and environmental sociology.

Disease advocacy organisations (DAOs) are critical for raising awareness about illnesses and supporting research. While most studies of DAOs focus on personally affected patient-activists, an underappreciated constituency are external allies. Building from social movement theory, we distinguish between beneficiary constituents (disease patients and their loved ones) and conscience constituents (allies) and investigate their relative fundraising effectiveness. While the former have credibility due to illness experience that should increase fundraising, the latter are more numerous. Our study is also the first to investigate where DAO supporters fundraise-through friendship- versus workplace-based networks-and how this interacts with constituent types. Our large-scale dataset includes 9372 groups (nearly 90,000 participants) active in the 'Movember' campaign, a men's health movement around testicular and prostate cancer. We find robust evidence that groups with more beneficiary constituents raise significantly greater funds per participant. Yet because conscience constituents are more numerous, they raise the majority of total aggregate funds. We also find an interaction effect: beneficiary constituents do better in friendship networks, conscience constituents in workplaces. Our findings bear implications for DAOs, indicating they may benefit by encouraging disease patient families to fundraise through friends, and for external allies to focus requests on workplace networks.

Sociological research on social movements and politics holds that advocacy organizations are typically trusted to be authentic agents of their constituents. At the same time, however, businesses and other outside interests often engage in covert “astroturfing” strategies in which they ventriloquize claims through apparently independent grassroots associations (but which are entirely funded and staffed to benefit the sponsor). These widespread and deceptive strategies may harm trust in advocacy groups overall, extending beyond those revealed to be involved, through a mechanism of categorical stigmatization. This study is the first to test how revealed covert patronage may “poison the well” for all advocacy groups, with implications for how social movements and other advocacy causes suffer harm from illegitimate political practices by other organizations. The authors carried out two survey-experiments in which a local advocacy organization was revealed to be operating, respectively, as a “front” for either a corporation or think tank; in each experiment, conditions varied depending upon whether the sponsor was presented as highly reputable, low reputation, or with no specified reputation. In both experiments, astroturfing led to significant declines in trust in advocacy groups overall. We highlight implications for theory and research on social movements, organizational theory, and political processes.

Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West By Daniel P. Aldrich Cornell University Press. 2008. 254 pages. $39.95 cloth. If "bringing the state back in" [...]