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 interpretive 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
By placing CDOH research in dialogue with established health equity theories, this analysis clarifies both where the field has developed explanatory strength and where deeper engagement with health equity theory is lacking. The analysis demonstrates that CDOH are embedded within and actively shape the social, economic, and political structures that produce and sustain health inequities. Future research should therefore move beyond exposure-centred analyses to examine how corporate power drives social stratification, differential vulnerability, and unequal consequences across the life course. In doing so, CDOH scholarship can more fully explain how commercial actors contribute not only to immediate harms, but to the enduring reproduction of structural health inequities over time.

Citations

• Introducing Health Politics
  Haejoo Chung, Carles Muntaner
  Health Politics.2026; 1(1): e001.     CrossRef

Background
The post–World War II institutional order that structured social protection and public health governance is under sustained strain, yet no coherent alternative has consolidated. Planetary, technological, and social transformations are simultaneously reshaping who lives, who receives care, and whose suffering is normalized. Political configurations are now more decisive for health and health equity than at any point in the postwar period.
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. No journal currently centres theories of power and institutions as applied to health.
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 economy, political sociology, and public health. It is anchored in the political economy of health tradition while engaging theories of power, institutions, and political processes from across the social sciences. 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, war and humanitarian restrictions in Gaza, climate disaster response in Canada, and platform power and adolescent mental health in EU and United States. Each case reveals distinct political mechanisms through which power produces health consequences.
Contribution
A new scholarly home for power-aware, methodologically rigorous health research that fills a structural gap in the journal landscape and provides an interdisciplinary platform for the emerging field of health politics.

Citations

• Introducing Health Politics
  Haejoo Chung, Carles Muntaner
  Health Politics.2026; 1(1): e001.     CrossRef