With this inaugural issue, Health Politics opens a new scholarly home for research that explains how power, institutions, and political conflict shape health and equity. The journal emerges at a moment when the post–World War II institutional order that has structured international cooperation, social protection, and public health governance are under sustained strain—and when political decisions made over the coming decade will shape health outcomes for generations. We believe the field needs a dedicated platform where political science, political sociology, political economy, and public health converge on these questions with the theoretical depth and methodological rigour they demand. This journal is concerned not only with policy, but with the political processes that produce and shape those policies.
This Issue
We begin with our inaugural editorial, “Why Health Politics?” (
Chung & Muntaner, 2026), which sets out the journal’s intellectual foundations. That essay argues that politics is not the only determinant of health among many. It is the arena in which all other determinants are organized and contested. The editorial situates the journal within the tradition of political economy of health. It also bridges that tradition with political science theory. These include historical institutionalism, power resources theory, comparative federalism, and regulatory governance. It articulates the journal’s commitment to methodological pluralism with a quantitative edge. The essay also identifies six research priority domains. These span labour and welfare states, health systems, corporate power, geopolitics, misinformation, and methods for studying power. We invite readers to treat that essay as a map of the terrain the journal seeks to cultivate.
The three research articles that follow demonstrate the range of political analysis Health Politics aims to publish. They differ in method, geography, and focus. But they share a common commitment: each treats political processes not as background context but as causal machinery that produces health-relevant outcomes.
Hassenteufel and Moyal (2026), in “The Role of Instrument Constituencies in Policy Change: The Case of Primary Care Reforms in France” brings mainstream comparative politics theory into the analysis of health system reform. Drawing on historical institutionalism, he develops the concept of Instrument constituencies—networks of actors who coalesce around specific policy instruments and sustain them across political cycles—and applies it to the contested trajectory of primary care restructuring in France. The article demonstrates what a political science lens reveals that a purely policy-analytic approach would miss: it is not enough to know that a reform was adopted; We need to understand which coalitions assembled around which instruments, how institutional configurations enabled or blocked change, and why certain instruments acquire political durability while others do not. This is the kind of theoretically grounded comparative work that sits at the heart of the journal’s agenda.
McNamara and Crosbie (2026), in “Applying a Health Equity Lens to the Commercial Determinants of Health: A Critical Review,” takes on one of the most rapidly growing areas in public health scholarship—the commercial determinants of health—and subject it to a critical examination through the lens of health equity. The commercial determinants literature has made an important progress in documenting how corporate practices harm health, but much of it remains descriptive rather than explanatory, cataloguing industry tactics without systematically analyzing the political and economic structures that sustain them. McNamara and Crosbie push the field forward by asking whose health is harmed, through what mechanisms equity is compromised, and what this means for regulatory and political responses. Their contribution exemplifies the journal’s interest in corporate power as a political phenomenon—one that requires analysis of lobbying, regulatory capture, and structural power, not merely documentation of harmful products.
Gunn and colleagues (2026), in “Development of a Sex- and Gender-Based Analysis Plus (SGBA+) Tool to Assess the Equity of Public Policies: The Case of COVID-19” addresses the methodological challenge of making equity analysis systematic and replicable. The SGBA+ tool she develops provides a structured framework for assessing whether public policies—in this case, pandemic responses—account for intersecting dimensions of inequality. The article speaks to the journal’s conviction that methodological innovation is not a separate enterprise from substantive political analysis; the tools we use to study health politics shape what we can see. Gunn et al.’s contribution demonstrates that rigorous equity assessment requires explicit analytical frameworks, not merely post hoc acknowledgement of differential impacts.
Reading Across the Issue
Three threads run across these contributions. The first is power. Hassenteufel shows how instrument constituencies accumulate political influence, shaping institutional trajectories. McNamara and Crosbie show how corporate actors use structural and instrumental power. This sustains health-damaging commercial practices. Gunn’s tool makes visible whose interests are served. It also reveals who is marginalized by policy responses that claim to be universal.
The second thread is equity. All three articles concern who benefits and who is harmed by political arrangements. McNamara and Crosbie foreground equity as an analytical lens for the commercial determinants. Gunn builds equity assessment into a replicable methodological tool. Hassenteufel shows how policy change shifts access to primary care across territories and populations. The journal’s founding premise runs through each contribution: politics determines who lives, who gets care, and whose suffering is normalized.
The third thread is institutions. Hassenteufel’s analysis is explicitly institutionalist, tracing how formal rules and organizational configurations mediate political contestation. McNamara and Crosbie implicates regulatory institutions—and their capture—as mechanisms through which corporate power operates. Gunn’s SGBA+ tool is itself an institutional innovation, designed to be embedded in policy-making processes.
Looking Ahead
Health Politics will publish quarterly. Each issue combines open-submission research articles, thematic forums, and a continuing methods series. Issue 2 will expand the journal’s geographic and methodological range. It will focus on quantitative and causal inference approaches and on political dynamics in the Global South. We welcome submissions from scholars across disciplines who share the conviction that understanding the politics of health is not an academic luxury but an intellectual and moral necessity. We thank the authors, reviewers, and editorial board members who made this first issue possible, and we invite readers to join a collective effort to make visible and challenge the political forces that shape health and inequity.
Notes
References
- Chung, H., & Muntaner, C. (2026). Why health politics? Power, institutions, and the political determinants of health in an age of converging crises. Health Politics, 1(1), e002. https://doi.org/10.66534/hp.2026.0002
- Gunn, V., O’Campo, P., Adan, M., Gill, P., Poonawala, T., Buhariwala, P., Matheson, F., Mawani, F., & Muntaner, C. (2026). Development of a sex- and gender-based analysis plus (SGBA+) tool to assess the equity of public policies: The case of COVID-19. Health Politics, 1(1), e003. https://doi.org/10.66534/hp.2026.0003
- Hassenteufel, P., & Moyal, A. (2026). The role of instrument constituencies in policy change: The case of primary care reforms in France. Health Politics, 1(1), e004. https://doi.org/10.66534/hp.2026.0004
- McNamara, C., & Crosbie, E. (2026). Applying a health equity lens to the commercial determinants of health: A critical review. Health Politics, 1(1), e005. https://doi.org/10.66534/hp.2026.0005
Citations
Citations to this article as recorded by
