Health Politics invites contributions to Methods — a continuing series on how the study of health politics is actually done. The journal was founded on the conviction that the forces shaping health and health systems, namely power, institutions, actors, and process, can be studied with the same rigour as any other object of political science, and that the field's progress depends as much on its methods as on its questions. The Methods series is where those tools are set out and put to work.

A Methods article explains a method and shows it working on a health-politics question. It is expository and applied rather than technical: the aim is not to propose a new estimator but to convey a usable sense of design, including what the method can identify, what it assumes, where it fails, and what its results license one to claim. Readers should finish the article able to attempt the design themselves.

What we are looking for

We welcome articles on any method that advances the analysis of power, institutions, actors, and process in health, at national, comparative, or global level. The following are indicative rather than exhaustive:

• Causal inference and design-based methods. Identification strategies for policy change, difference-in-differences and synthetic control, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and the design of comparative counterfactuals in health politics.
• Comparative and configurational methods. Comparative case studies, process tracing, and set-theoretic approaches including QCA.
• Network methods. Social, policy, and actor networks; elite and ownership structures; governance networks.
• Multilevel and spatial methods. Territorial health inequalities, jurisdictional variation, and the measurement of context.
• Text-as-data and computational measurement. Corpus construction from legislative, regulatory, and administrative sources; longitudinal policy measures; LLM-assisted extraction and its validation.
• Simulation. System dynamics and agent-based modelling of policy and governance processes.
• Interpretive and participatory methods. Realist synthesis and realist evaluation; participatory research; digital ethnography of contested health politics; decolonising approaches.
• Mixed and intersectionality-informed designs. Integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence on power and its distribution.
• Measurement. Operationalising power resources, institutional configurations, and political contestation; index construction and its validation.
• Research design and review standards. Designing studies in health politics, and standards for reviewing and synthesising them.

Articles that take methodological disagreement seriously are particularly welcome: the series is a place to argue about what counts as evidence of political causation in health, not only to demonstrate technique.

Format

• Length. Up to 8,000 words of main text, excluding the abstract, references, tables, and figures.
• Abstract. Unstructured, up to 200 words.
• Worked example. At least one worked example on a health-politics question is required. An article that explains a method without applying it will be returned.
• Supplementary material. Code, data notes, and replication material are welcome as supplementary files and do not count toward the word limit. Where the argument rests on data or code, we expect them to be available.
• Style. APA 7th edition.

Timeline

Methods is a continuous, rolling call: proposals and manuscripts are welcome at any time, and accepted articles are placed in the next issue for which they can be produced. Each issue of the journal carries one or two Methods articles.

How to propose or submit

Write to journal@hpolitics.org with a one-paragraph proposal (the method, and the health-politics question you would use to show it working), or submit a full article via submit.hpolitics.org, indicating "Methods" in your cover letter. Unsolicited submissions undergo peer review.

Health Politics is a Diamond Open Access journal (CC BY 4.0): no article processing charges apply, and authors retain copyright.

Carles Muntaner & Haejoo Chung
Editors-in-Chief, Health Politics

Rolling submissions — proposals welcome at any time  ·  Up to 8,000 words with at least one worked example  ·  Indicate "Methods" in your cover letter  ·  submit.hpolitics.org