ABSTRACT

As local governments wade into policy arenas that extend beyond their traditional set of responsibilities – including those associated with sustainability and climate change – they are often compelled to explain and justify their actions. In this context, issue framing can serve as a strategic political tool. The issue of plastic pollution, which has simultaneous substantive local and global problem dimensions offers the opportunity to examine the factors that influence cities’ strategic use of proximate and public goods-based issue frames when making a case for policy action. Nearly 300 U.S. city governments have passed ordinances establishing policies that – either through a ban, fee, or combination thereof – aim to reduce the consumption of plastic bags. By coding the ‘purpose’ sections of these ordinances, this research identifies nine distinct rationales, each of which characterizes the benefits of plastic bag reduction as a proximate or public good. Empirical analyses on the factors that influence cities’ framing decisions finds that having a coastal location is associated with the greater use of a general public goods frame and that cities with more politically conservative residents or with more conservative state governments are less likely to invoke rationales related to climate protection in the text of their ordinances.

摘要

随着地方政府涉足超出其传统职责范围的政策领域——包括与可持续性和气候变化相关的职责——他们往往被迫解释和证明自己的行为。在这种情况下，问题框架可以作为一种战略政治工具。塑料污染问题同时具有实质性的地方和全球问题维度，这为研究影响城市在制定政策行动案例时战略性使用基于公共产品的问题框架的因素提供了机会。近 300 个美国城市政府已经通过了制定政策的法令——无论是通过禁令、收费还是两者结合——旨在减少塑料袋的消费。通过对这些条例的“目的”部分进行编码，这项研究确定了九个不同的理由，每个理由都将减少塑料袋的好处描述为一种直接或公共利益。对影响城市框架决策因素的实证分析发现，拥有沿海位置与更多地使用一般公共产品框架有关，而居民政治上较为保守或州政府较为保守的城市则不太可能援引相关理由。气候保护在他们的法令文本中。