# How to Disrupt Harmful Corporate Political Activity? Comment on "Corporate Political Activity: Taxonomies and Model of Corporate Influence on Public Policy"

## TL;DR

This paper discusses how to disrupt harmful corporate influence on public health policies by expanding existing models with policy theories.

## Contribution

The paper introduces four policy theories and applies Punctuated Equilibrium Theory to challenge corporate influence.

## Key findings

- Ulucanlar's model can assess an industry's policy monopoly and its weakening points.
- Applying PET helps understand how policy breakthroughs can disrupt corporate political activity.
- Metaphorical framing grounded in morality can counter corporate framing strategies.

## Abstract

Ulucanlar and colleagues’ model of corporate political activity by unhealthy commodity industries identifies cross-industry framing and actions that block public health policies. While the model helps to understand policy inertia around the prevention of commercially-driven diseases, it needs expansion into broader theories on policy change and framing to help understand how policy breakthroughs can be achieved. We substantiate this viewpoint by introducing four established policy theories, and by situating Ulucanlar and colleagues’ model within our application of the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET), a theory that explicitly focuses on disruption of policy inertia. We outline how Ulucanlar and colleagues’ taxonomy can help investigate the strength of an industry’s policy monopoly and identify when and how an industry’s power might be crumbling. We further situate Ulucanlar and colleagues’ model within the concept of metaphorical framing, arguing that more robust grounding of the model in frameworks on morality can effectively challenge framing strategies of unhealthy commodity industries.