The Political Sociology of Tobacco Policy: Bureaucratic Activism and the Social Problem of Secondhand Smoke.

The issue of secondhand smoke, and its eventual statutory prohibition from indoor public places in Oklahoma, illustrates two important theoretical perspectives in the socio-politics of public health issues; the participatory democracy of John Dewey's American Pragmatism, and the bureaucratic activist perspective of New Public Administration. This paper is a qualitative case study of the sociological process of interaction between state-level administrative bureaucracy, private advocacy groups, legislative bodies, private industry, and public media to re-construct the social problem of secondhand smoke and its eventual regulation. Ethnographic research from 1987 to 2003 indicates that little progress in public health goals toward tobacco control were made until 2003, when an Oklahoma Health Commissioner's aggressive campaign, in conjunction with health advocacy groups and media attention, initiated the process of clean-indoor-air legislation in a socio-political environment that had previous been dominated by tobacco industry influence. We argue that this outcome supports the efficacy of New Public Administration, as well as ASPA's Code of Ethics for interactive democratic policymaking (linked with Dewey's American Pragmatism), in changing the public perception of a health issue as a social problem, and thereby securing substantive policy results. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]