This second issue continues the work of the first. Our inaugural issue set out what the journal is for: the study of how power, institutions, and political conflict shape health and equity. That agenda draws on a long line of work in comparative politics on how institutions change and who gains when they do (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). This issue takes up that program across five articles: one on the structures that produce health and ill health, one on the field’s own vocabulary, and three that open a new series of political portraits of national health systems.

Bambra and Schrecker (2026) open the issue with “Neoliberalism: The Politics of Health Writ Large.” They argue that neoliberalism has acted as an upstream determinant of population health for the past half-century, operating through four causal pathways: widening inequality, pervasive insecurity, chronic stress, and the rising power of commercial actors. Austerity serves as their case study. They show how political and economic choices are translated into biologically embodied outcomes over the life course, and they argue that reducing health inequalities means confronting the structures that generate them.

Chung and colleagues (2026) turn to the field’s own vocabulary in “Mapping ‘Health Politics’: Two Conceptual Traditions, 1976–2025.” Through a scoping review and content analysis of 457 records, they trace how terms such as “health politics,” “politics of health,” and “political determinants of health” have been used over five decades. They find two conceptual traditions behind the shared vocabulary: one applied and centered on the policy process, the other critical and centered on structural power. Their typology offers an organizing framework for a field whose terminology has outpaced its conceptual scaffolding, building on established methods of concept formation in political science (e.g., Sartori, 1970; Adcock & Collier, 2001). It places the political determinants of health inside that map rather than outside it.

The issue then opens the National Health Politics series. These essays offer political portraits of national health systems. Each analyzes its system as the outcome of contested politics, tracing the actors, institutions, and power relations that shaped it. The series begins in East Asia.

Huang (2026), in “Beyond National Health Insurance: The Contested Politics of Long-Term Care in Taiwan,” reads Taiwan’s health politics through two enduring cleavages. The first runs between cost containment and electoral expansion in national health insurance. The second runs between public care and household-based migrant labor in long-term care. These tensions have pushed reform toward incremental expansion and a continued reliance on stratified care labor. Huang’s analysis of how electoral dynamics and fiscal constraints interact extends a comparative literature on welfare politics in democratic Taiwan and Korea (Wong, 2004). The essay tracks power as it moves across the state, providers, professions, and civil society.

Shin (2026), in “The Co-evolution of Politics and the Healthcare System in South Korea,” traces how Korea came to rely so heavily on private provision, even as it built universal insurance coverage in little more than a decade (Kwon, 2009). He follows a long contest between ruling power and its opposition across successive regime periods, from colonialism through authoritarian development to democratization. The system’s structure, he argues, is the institutional sediment of that contest. He then sets out three crises now facing it: continued pressure to privatize, fiscal strain from rapid population aging, and the consequences of artificial intelligence for civil, labor, and social rights.

Matsuda (2026) extends the series to Japan in “Healthcare Politics in Japan: Differentiated Policy Dynamics across Multiple Arenas.” He reads Japan’s health politics as a set of distinct arenas rather than a single process. The country’s universal statutory health insurance rests on a dense public and private arrangement in which most providers sit outside direct state control. Policy is made separately across four arenas: consensus-building in advisory councils, the biennial revision of medical fees and drug prices, system-wide insurance reform, and delivery reforms that run through central and local government. The fee schedule in particular has long served as the system’s central lever of cost control (Campbell & Ikegami, 1998). Recent shifts, including a move from bureaucratic coordination toward political leadership, a more fluid party landscape, and the growing salience of cost-sharing, are reshaping distributive conflict inside a system still committed to universal coverage. Patient voices enter these arenas unevenly, constrained for the most part but on occasion decisive, as when cancer patients forced the withdrawal of a proposed increase in cost-sharing in 2025. Matsuda closes by taking up the diagnosis set out in this journal’s inaugural article, that the field has under-theorized power and leaned too lightly on causal inference, and argues that Japan, with its regional variation and its institutional transition, offers fertile ground for exactly that work.

The articles speak to one another across scales. Bambra and Schrecker work at the largest scale, tracing how neoliberalism reorganizes the economic and political conditions that shape health across whole populations. Huang, Shin, and Matsuda bring that scale down into single countries, where the same forces are built into institutions and met by the actors who resist them. In Taiwan, contestation runs through premium committees and the regulation of migrant care labor. In Korea, it runs through a century-long contest between ruling power and the movements that pushed back. In Japan, it runs through separate policy arenas, most sharply where pressure to contain spending meets a commitment to universal coverage in disputes over patient cost-sharing. Read together, they show power built into institutions and unevenly countered. Chung and colleagues stand apart from the others. Rather than analyzing a system, they examine how the field has named these forces in the first place, and remind us that the vocabulary we use to study health politics shapes what we are able to see.

Health Politics publishes continuously online. Articles are published in each issue upon completion of production. The National Health Politics series will continue past this issue and extend to further countries. Coming issues will also build out the methods series and the thematic forums. We thank the authors, reviewers, and editorial board members who made this issue possible, and we welcome work from anyone who takes the politics of health seriously.

Notes

References

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