Melissa K. Merry's Books

Framing Environmental Disaster

Environmental Advocacy and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

By: Melissa K. Merry

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Framing Environmental Disaster

Environmental Advocacy and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

By: Melissa K. Merry

The blowout of the Deepwater Horizon and subsequent underground oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is considered by many to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Interest groups, public officials, and media organizations have spent considerable time documenting the economic and ecological impacts of this spill as well as the causes of the spill, ostensibly to prevent future disasters of this magnitude. However, rather than an unbiased search for answers, such investigations involve strategic efforts by a variety of political actors to define the spill and its causes in ways that lead to their preferred policy solutions. Framing Environmental Disaster evaluates the causal stories that environmental groups tell about the spill and develops theoretical propositions about the role of such stories in the policy process. Which actors do groups hold responsible, and how do groups use blame attributions to advance their policy agendas? Constructing a creative methodological approach which includes content analysis drawn from blog posts, emails, press releases, and testimony before Congress and insights and quotations drawn from interviews with environmental group representatives, Melissa K. Merry argues that interest groups construct causal explanations long before investigations of policy problems are complete and use focusing events to cast blame for a wide range of harms not directly tied to the events themselves. In doing so, groups seek to take full advantage of “windows of opportunity” resulting from crises. An indispensable resource for scholars of public policy and environmental politics and policy, this book sheds new light on the implications of the gulf disaster for energy politics and policies while advancing scholarly understandings of the role of framing and causal attribution in the policy process.

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Page Count

185

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1136274111

ISBN 13

9781136274114

Warped Narratives

Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy

By: Melissa Kate Merry

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Warped Narratives

Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy

By: Melissa Kate Merry

The politics of gun policy in the United States are dramatic. Against the backdrop of daily gun violence—which claims more than 33,000 lives per year—gun control groups push for stronger regulations, while gun rights groups resist infringements upon their Second Amendment rights. To illuminate the dynamics of this polarized debate, Warped Narratives examines how and why interest groups frame the gun violence problem in particular ways, exploring the implication of groups’ framing choices for policymaking and politics. Melissa K. Merry argues that the gun policy arena is warped, and that both gun control and gun rights organizations contribute to the distortion of the issue by focusing on atypical characters and settings in their policy narratives. Gun control groups emphasize white victims, child victims, and mass shootings in suburban locales, while gun rights groups focus on self-defense shootings, highlighting threats to “law-abiding” gun owners. In reality, most gun deaths are the result of suicide. Homicides occur disproportionately in urban areas, mainly affecting racial minorities. While warping makes political sense in the short term, it may lead to negative, long-term consequences, including constraints on groups’ ability to build broad-based coalitions and to reduce prospects for compromise. To demonstrate warping, Merry analyzes nearly 67,000 communications by 15 national gun policy groups between 2000 and 2017 collected from blogs, emails, Facebook posts, and press releases. This book is the first to systematically assess the role of race in gun policy groups’ framing and offers the most comprehensive examination to date of interest groups’ presentation of this issue.

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Page Count

237

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472131664

ISBN 13

9780472131662

Warped Narratives

Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy

By: Melissa Kate Merry

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Warped Narratives

Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy

By: Melissa Kate Merry

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N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

237

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472126245

ISBN 13

9780472126248

Book's by Melissa K. Merry

Framing Environmental Disaster

Framing Environmental Disaster

Warped Narratives

Warped Narratives

Warped Narratives

Warped Narratives

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