Policy and Politics of BSE in the United States

Abstract

Policy research is the study of how laws and regulations are formed, including the decision-making templates, the methods employed, and the motivations behind policy deliberations (Morgan & Henrion 1990). Policy analysis is the process of developing a regulatory decision to address a specific problem (e.g., reaction to an emerging public health threat) or to establish policy for a new phenomenon (e.g., genetics and food production). Those engaged in health policy research conduct case studies with the aim of identifying trends in analytical models employed by particular regulatory agencies. Policy development is dynamic, however; its a complex social process that often is played out in the public arena, which means no single model will prevail even within the same agency.

Extant research suggests multiple views of how policy parameters are defined. In contemporary American society, health policy is deliberated not only by regulatory bodies and independent analysts, but also by potentially affected parties, whose messages are managed and filtered to targeted publics (Morgan & Henrion 1990). One of the best contexts to study public influence on policy involves public health risk, such as food safety (Sobal & Maurer 1995). In the past few decades, irradiated food, Salmonella poisoning, E.coli, mad cow disease, genetically altered food, animal cloning, chemicals in food processing, and pesticide use in agriculture, to name a few, all have been addressed by regulatory agencies. Even in similar risk-level situations, policy outcomes have differed (for a review, see Morgan & Henrion 1990). One way of making sense of these differences is to study how scientific uncertainty is addressed in each case. Rarely is it the case that probability calculations and predictive modeling provide defining evidence pointing to one policy approach.