Background
Politics—understood as the exercise of power through institutions, ideologies, coalitions, and conflict—is a core determinant of health and health equity. The established institutional order is fracturing, yet no coherent alternative has consolidated. The scale, speed, and stakes of contemporary transformations—planetary, technological, and social—make political configurations more decisive than ever.
Problem
Scholarship on health politics remains fragmented across disciplines, theoretically under-developed in its treatment of power relations, and methodologically limited in its capacity for causal inference. Existing journals either publish health politics research as a secondary concern within broader portfolios or lack the editorial infrastructure to integrate the theoretical and methodological traditions the field requires.
Aim
To establish Health Politics as a dedicated, interdisciplinary journal for rigorous, policy-relevant research that explains how power, institutions, and political conflict shape health and health equity.
Approach
The journal bridges political science, political sociology, political economy, and public health. It is anchored in the political economy of health tradition while engaging mainstream political science theory—from historical institutionalism to power resources theory. It combines methodological pluralism with a quantitative edge, emphasizing causal inference alongside qualitative depth and comparative analysis.
Illustrative cases
Four current examples demonstrate how politics shapes health under crisis conditions: the politicization of vaccination policy (executive power and scientific authority), war and humanitarian restrictions in Gaza (geopolitics and necropolitics), climate disaster response in Canada (federalism and environmental justice), and platform power and adolescent mental health (corporate power and digital governance).
Contribution
A new scholarly home for power-aware, methodologically rigorous health research that fills a structural gap in the journal landscape.

Background
Crisis-driven policymaking often unfolds under conditions of urgency and heightened political pressure, producing policies portrayed as neutral but embedding assumptions that obscure power asymmetries and deepen existing inequities. A literature review revealed a scarcity of policy analysis instruments capable of evaluating the gendered and intersectional equity-promoting potential of public policies.
Purpose
This paper describes the development of a sex- and gender-based analysis plus (SGBA+) tool designed to assess whether COVID-19 public policies meaningfully consider equity and inclusion.
Approach
The tool’s development followed an iterative process involving a mapping literature review, a structured planning and design phase, piloting with Canadian pandemic policies, and consultation with community organizations working with population groups facing marginalization or exclusion.
Findings
The resulting tool comprises 81 questions across six policy dimensions, with a scoring system that rates policies from “unequal” to “transformative” based on their responsiveness to gender and intersecting social identities. While validity and reliability have not yet been tested, the tool fills an identified gap in equity-oriented policy analysis.
Implications
With adjustments, the tool could be applied to public policies adopted in response to health, environmental, and economic crises. By making visible how policy design distributes resources and risks, SGBA+ approaches offer policymakers, advocates, and researchers a concrete means to interrogate decision-making and guide emergency governance toward greater equity.

Background
After encountering funding problems in the 1980s, the French healthcare system is now facing new types of public problems that trigger organizational responses. This is the case with the growing shortage of medical workforce since the 2000s—particularly GPs—leading to geographical inequalities in access to primary care. The expression “medical desert” has since flourished in political discourse and the press, contributing to the dramatization of the problem and pushing it to the top of the political agenda. At the same time, we are witnessing the development of a new repertoire of policy instruments that make primary care—and GPs in particular—the cornerstone of the healthcare system. Objective: Based on an empirical qualitative analysis, this paper highlights the key role played by a new “instrument constituency” (Béland & Howlett, 2015; Voß & Simons, 2014) in the primary care reform process. This constituency consists of a small group of GPs —open to team-based practice, the integration of psychosocial dimensions of health, and changes in payment methods— playing the role of professional entrepreneurs, and the established “Welfare elite” —composed of political actors and civil servants who share reform objectives regarding health policies.
Approach
The paper adopts a processual approach, first focusing on the formation of this instrument constituency (around a specific organizational model: the multi-professional healthcare centers), then its gradual institutionalization through successive reforms (e.g., new financing methods and territorial integration of healthcare services) and the evolution of this instrument constituency (more specifically, the evolution of the roles and positions of its members).
Findings
The instrument constituency progressively institutionalized through new financing methods and territorial integration of healthcare services, extending to new professional and political actors. However, the persistence of the “medical deserts” problem and the proliferation of competing policy instruments have recently weakened this constituency.
Implications
The paper raises the question of the constituency’s sustainability in the current context of increasing conflicts in the French healthcare system, and opens a broader discussion on the role of instrument constituencies in policy change.

Background
Commercial determinants of health (CDOH) are increasingly recognised as central to health inequities, yet CDOH scholarship has not consistently engaged with established health equity theories. As a result, CDOH research often invokes equity without clearly articulating the mechanisms through which commercial power translates into unequal health outcomes. This review addresses this conceptual gap by examining how health equity theories can be used to interpret and organise CDOH scholarship and clarify where theoretical engagement is strongest and where key gaps remain.
Methods
A theory-informed critical analytical review was conducted using purposive sampling of influential conceptual papers and review literature in the CDOH field. Six established health equity explanations and theories were used as interpretive lenses: cultural-behavioural, materialist, and psychosocial perspectives; fundamental cause theory, the Diderichsen model, and life course theory. Included documents were analysed for explicit engagement with these frameworks, conceptual alignment, and unrealised opportunities for theorising mechanisms linking commercial practices to health inequities.
Results
CDOH scholarship most clearly aligns with cultural-behavioural explanations through its emphasis on how corporate actors shape consumption patterns and risk environments. Engagement with materialist and psychosocial perspectives is growing but remains comparatively limited. Fundamental cause theory and the Diderichsen model offer underutilised tools for specifying how corporate power contributes not only to differential exposure but also to social stratification, differential vulnerability, and unequal social consequences of illness. Life course perspectives remain notably underdeveloped.
Conclusion
Established health equity theories provide substantial untapped potential for expanding CDOH scholarship. Using these frameworks as a conceptual map clarifies the mechanisms of inequality most commonly addressed in current CDOH research and highlights gaps. CDOH are embedded within and actively shape the social, economic, and political structures that produce and sustain health inequities. Moving beyond exposure-centred analyses to examine how corporate power drives social stratification, differential vulnerability, and unequal consequences across the life course will strengthen not only CDOH scholarship but public health more broadly, enhancing its capacity to address the structural reproduction of health inequities over time.