Katharina Selda Moerschel, Peter von Philipsborn, Elizabeth McGill and Benjamin Hawkins
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Evidence-related framing in the German debate on sugar taxation: a qualitative framing analysis and international comparison’.
Although sugar taxation is considered an important evidence-based intervention in the fight against obesity, some countries, such as Germany, have not yet implemented such a tax. While evidence does matter in policy processes, it does not speak for itself; it must be interpreted and used in specific contexts. What this context looks like, i.e. the framing of the underlying problem and the policy objectives, depends on the goals of the policy actor. To better understand how stakeholders in Germany argue for and against sugar taxation and how they utilised evidence, we examined how evidence was framed in 114 newspaper articles and compared our findings with similar studies from Mexico, the US and the UK.
German stakeholders demonstrated similar patterns of evidence use and evidence claims to those found in Mexico, the US and the UK. Tax supporters framed obesity as being (at least partly) attributable to sugar consumption and identified a reduction in sugar consumption as a key policy objective. They cited Mexico and the UK as main examples of successful reduction in sugar intake and framed sugar taxation as an effective means to tackle obesity in combination with other interventions.
Tax opponents, on the other hand, depicted obesity as a complex problem and denied that sugar consumption has a relevant impact on obesity rates. They contested the evidence on the effects of sugar and depicted nutritional sciences as unreliable, thereby framing sugar taxation as unnecessary and too simplistic. At the same time, they criticised the lack of evidence on the effects of sugar taxation on body weight and framed sugar taxation as ineffective.
Examples from other countries were salient on both sides of the debate, confirming how quickly regulations and research in one country can influence policy debates elsewhere. This is a lesson we know well from the tobacco industry and it serves as a reminder to keep potential global effects in mind when planning and communicating research.
Moreover, research on policy processes in one country can be used to anticipate the forms and content of policy debates as well as the lines of argumentation deployed by policy actors in other countries. In contrast to Mexico, the US and the UK, German tax opponents did not employ many arguments regarding potential economic harm from sugar taxation. This might be due to the fact that, despite widespread debate on the topic, no concrete legislative proposals to introduce a sugar tax had been brought forward in Germany at the time of our study. However, such argumentation may come up if and when such proposals take shape. Analysing the evidence on policy processes in other countries helped us anticipate which arguments German public health advocates might face from opponents in the future and allows for effective preparation of evidence and strategies for forthcoming policy debates.
In summary, our study shows that researchers must not simply create but also curate and explain the evidence on sugar taxation to relevant stakeholders. They need to bear in mind the potentially global influence of their research and can learn from each other in order to improve public health advocacy locally. In doing so, public health actors will be able to more effectively counteract spurious depictions of evidence on the possible impacts of sugar taxation and other public health measures.
Katharina Selda Moerschel is a public health researcher, and a medical student and doctoral candidate at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. She is passionate about public policy-level health promotion, prevention of non-communicable diseases and public health ethics and concluded her MSc Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine with a comprehensive qualitative analysis on framing in the German debate on sugar taxation. Find her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Peter von Philipsborn is a medical doctor and a public health researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany. He works at the crossroads of research, policy and practice, with a particular focus on policy and systems approaches for healthy and sustainable diets.
Elizabeth McGill is an Assistant Professor in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is interested in complex systems evaluation and the commercial determinants of health.
Benjamin Hawkins is Senior Research Associate at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the political economy of health governance, particularly the role of the global alcohol, tobacco and food industries on influencing policy-making.
Image credit: Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash
You can read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Moerschel, K.S. von Philipsborn, P. Hawkins, B. and McGill E. (2022). Evidence-related framing in the German debate on sugar taxation: a qualitative framing analysis and international comparison. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/174426421X16448353303856.
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