This paper argues that the academic literature on the political strategies of 'unhealthy commodity industries' offers no insights into political science because the tactics identified are not specific to those industries. Without a control group of benign or healthy industries to compare them...

Mancur Olson explained in The Logic of Collective Action (1965) that the free rider problem and the paradox of participation discourage rational consumers from taking collective action to oppose policies that disadvantage them. The lack of grassroots opposition to 'nanny state' policies from...

In 2016, the IEA and EPICENTER launched the first edition of Dr Christopher Snowdon's 'Nanny State Index', which tries to measure the degree of restrictiveness of paternalistic policies that interfere with personal lifestyle choices in various areas. 'Nanny state' is obviously a pejorative term,...

The theoretical advantage of single-issue pressure groups is that they can form broad coalitions, gathering people from across the political spectrum who need not agree on anything other than the group's single issue. For example, Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) is a group that...