The post–World War II institutional order that structured international cooperation, social protection, and public health governance is under sustained strain. The neoliberal regime that has governed these domains since the late twentieth century has been in crisis since at least 2008, yet no coherent alternative has consolidated (Fraser, 2022; Rodrik, 2017; Streeck, 2025; Tooze, 2021). We inhabit what Gramsci (1973) termed an interregnum—a period in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. The signs are everywhere: armed conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan demonstrate how war, occupation, and geopolitical rivalry produce health catastrophe through the deliberate destruction of health infrastructure and the instrumentalization of humanitarian access (Rubenstein, 2021); the withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization in January 2026 illustrates the fragility of multilateral health governance (Gostin et al., 2020); contested pandemic treaty negotiations expose the limits of international cooperation under geopolitical competition (Eccleston-Turner & Upton, 2021); and the accelerating dismantlement of environmental and labour protections in multiple countries reveals the vulnerability of hard-won institutional achievements (International Trade Union Confederation, 2024; 2025; United Nations Environment Programme, 2025). Historical institutionalists describe such periods as “critical junctures”, when established pathways become unusually open to fundamental change (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007; Collier & Collier, 1991).

This instability unfolds alongside three interacting transformations whose trajectories remain fundamentally open. First, a planetary transformation: climate change forces societies to reconsider energy systems, agriculture, and settlement patterns, and whether this becomes cascading catastrophe or managed transition depends on political choices about mitigation, adaptation, and justice (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023; Rockström et al., 2023; United Nations Environment Programme, 2025). Second, a technological transformation: artificial intelligence, platforms, and data infrastructures are reshaping health governance, labour markets, and public accountability, and whether these deepen inequality or enable democratic participation will be decided through political struggle over ownership, rights, and regulation (Acemoglu & Johnson, 2023; Crawford, 2021; World Health Organization, 2021; Zuboff, 2019). Third, a social transformation: demographic ageing, intensifying care crises, and labour precarity are destabilizing postwar welfare arrangements, and whether this leads to authoritarian backlash or democratic renewal remains a key political question (Esping-Andersen & Myles, 2011; Fraser, 2016; International Labour Organization, 2023; Streeck, 2017; World Bank, 2022). These are not predetermined “crises” with automatic outcomes. They are contested transformations whose direction depends on political processes, power relations, and collective choices (Muntaner et al., 2012). During such moments, institutions become fluid, coalitions realign, and futures once deemed unrealistic can become thinkable. However, openings cut both ways—democratic innovations face authoritarian responses, and just transitions compete with exclusionary forms of “adaptation” (Rockström et al., 2023; Rodrik, 2017). The decisions made over the next decade will influence health outcomes and inequities for generations.

That is why we launch Health Politics.

Political choices—about rights, resources, regulation, and recognition—shape who lives, who receives care, and whose suffering becomes normalized (Navarro & Shi, 2001). Politics determines whether innovations promote equity or reinforce privilege, whether transitions are managed smoothly or become catastrophic, and whose interests dominate when conflicts arise (Muntaner & Chung, 2008; Navarro et al., 2006). Politics is not just one factor among many—it is the arena where these factors are organised and challenged (Beckfield, 2018; Muntaner et al., 2011a). It is where corporate power is either constrained or consolidated (Mialon, 2020), where resources are distributed or hoarded (Lynch, 2019), where knowledge is either validated or marginalized (Abimbola, 2019), and where futures are envisioned and contested (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015).

We do not claim that politics is the only factor, nor that political analysis can replace biological, environmental, or technological explanations. Material pressures—climate disruption, pathogen evolution, demographic change, technological capacity—impose real constraints on what political action can accomplish, and some health improvements have occurred through scientific and economic progress largely independent of political intent (Deaton, 2013). However, material pressures do not solely determine outcomes. The same pressures can lead to vastly different health trajectories depending on political coalitions, institutions, and power relations (Chung & Muntaner, 2006; 2007; Greer et al., 2021; Navarro et al., 2006). The question is not whether biology or technology matter—of course they do—but whether political processes receive the analytical attention they deserve given their causal significance. Currently, they do not (Muntaner & Chung, 2008). Politics may not decide everything, but it influences far more than most health research recognizes.

The three transformations outlined above are mutually reinforcing: climate stress worsens inequality (Romanello et al., 2024); inequality fragments the political coalitions needed for climate response (Newell & Mulvaney, 2013; Streeck, 2025) technology mediates both for better or worse depending on governance choices (Acemoglu & Johnson, 2023). But politics is not only a site of conflict—it is also a site of institutional invention. Participatory platforms, movement-based monitoring, transnational coalitions, and living labs are all testing alternative governance models (Bussu et al., 2022; Fishkin, 2018; Landemore, 2020; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2020; Schot & Steinmueller, 2018). The question is not whether these tools will exist, but who will control them, through what rules, and toward what ends.

By “health politics,” we mean the study of how power, institutions, and political conflict shape health outcomes and health equity (Bambra, 2016; Beckfield, 2018; Muntaner et al., 2011a). It is not the study of policy outcomes, but of the political processes that produce them. The concept has a distinguished lineage. Immergut’s (1992) landmark comparative study of health insurance politics in France, Sweden, and Switzerland—titled, not coincidentally, Health Politics—demonstrated that the structure of political institutions, not the preferences of interest groups alone, determines policy outcomes. This journal takes its name and its analytical orientation from that insight, extending it from health insurance to the full range of political processes that shape health: state capacity and institutional design; parties, ideology, and policy regimes; corporate power and regulatory struggle; social movements, unions, and civil society; geopolitics, great-power competition, and health diplomacy; war, occupation, and border regimes; and the commercial determinants of health understood as systemic power relations (Gilmore et al., 2023; Madureira Lima & Galea, 2018). The agenda also extends to crisis-driven frontiers: climate governance and health adaptation; digital health governance and platform power; migration and displacement; and just transitions (Romanello et al., 2024; World Health Organization, 2025).

Research on the politics of health is published, but it is scattered across journals whose primary missions lie elsewhere—and none provides the dedicated, integrative home the field requires (Beckfield, 2018; Muntaner et al., 2011a). In most cases, political analysis remains secondary to behavioural, clinical, or programmatic research priorities, limiting the field’s ability to explain how power and institutions shape health outcomes.

The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law (JHPPL) has published important work on U.S. health policy and comparative health systems, but its orientation is primarily toward policy studies and American politics rather than the broader political economy of health (e.g.,Hacker, 2002), and it does not foreground the theoretical traditions that are central to understanding how structural power produces health inequalities. Social Science & Medicine and Global Public Health welcome health-politics manuscripts, but as parts of much larger portfolios; political analysis competes for space with behavioural, clinical, and programme-evaluation research (Muntaner & Chung, 2008; Schrecker & Bambra, 2025), and neither journal has the editorial infrastructure—reviewers drawn from political science, specialist methods editors, dedicated theory sections—to cultivate the field systematically. Globalization and Health and BMJ Global Health address governance questions but from a lens that typically centres on policy outcomes and implementation rather than the political processes, power relations, and institutional dynamics that produce those outcomes (e.g., Madureira Lima & Galea, 2018; Storeng et al., 2021).

Closest to the present journal is the tradition represented by the International Journal of Health Services (IJHS), long the principal outlet for political economy of health scholarship. The journal’s recent transformation into the International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services is itself revealing: the field’s flagship has moved toward a social determinants framing, while the need for a journal centred on political processes and power relations remains unfilled (Schrecker & Bambra, 2025) Even in its earlier incarnation, IJHS published across health services, health policy, and political economy without a dedicated focus on the political mechanisms that produce health outcomes. It did not systematically engage with political science theory nor with the quantitative causal inference methods that could strengthen the field’s empirical foundations (e.g., Hacker (2002); Immergut (1992)). And its engagement with the crisis-driven frontiers of climate politics, digital governance, and geopolitical transformation was limited (Romanello et al., 2024; World Health Organization, 2025).

The need for such a journal is not merely institutional but intellectual. Health outcomes increasingly depend on discrete political decisions made under crisis conditions—border closures, executive orders, legislative dismantlement—yet health research often lacks the tools to analyze these dynamics causally (Cunningham, 2021; Hernán & Robins, 2020). Despite significant contributions from social epidemiology and the social determinants of health literature, mainstream health research continues to treat political conditions as background variables rather than causal mechanisms (Muntaner et al., 2011a; Schrecker & Bambra, 2025). Theories of the state, class, racial and gendered power, and regulation remain underutilized (Beckfield, 2018; Muntaner et al., 2011b). This theoretical deficit is evident across emerging fields: in climate research, the political economy of fossil fuel subsidies is insufficiently theorized (Newell & Simms, 2020; Tooze, 2021); in scholarship on commercial determinants, documentation of corporate practices remains descriptive rather than explaining the political processes that sustain them (Friel et al., 2023; Gilmore et al., 2023); in digital health, governance and justice issues remain peripheral to technical implementation research (Morley et al., 2020; World Health Organization, 2025).

The analytical tools exist—in political science, political sociology, and political economy—but they have not been systematically applied to health. Nowhere is this more consequential than in global health governance, where pandemic treaty negotiations, vaccine equity failures, and climate finance debates all involve political conflicts that existing health research is ill-equipped to analyze (Abimbola & Pai, 2020; Schrecker & Bambra, 2025) Global health governance is a field of political conflict that requires political analysis—and a journal capable of providing it.

Health Politics publishes research that explains—not just describes—how power, institutions, and political conflict shape health and equity, with particular attention to the converging crises of our time: planetary emergency, social inequality, and technological transformation. We are committed to rigorous empirical analysis, theoretical pluralism with analytical precision, policy relevance without advocacy capture, epistemic justice, and democratic engagement with the urgent political challenges of our time.

The journal is anchored in the intellectual tradition of the political economy of health, as developed by Doyal and Pennell (1979), Navarro (2002), Muntaner and colleagues (2011), and their collaborators over five decades. This tradition insists that health inequalities are produced and reproduced through class relations, state power, and the political organization of production and social reproduction—not merely through individual risk factors or technocratic policy failures (Beckfield, 2018; Navarro, 2002). It draws on neo-Marxist class analysis to explain how exploitation and domination in employment relations generate health inequalities (Muntaner et al., 2015); on welfare state theory to show how political coalitions and power resources shape social policies that determine population health (Chung & Muntaner, 2006; 2007; International Labour Organization, 2023; Navarro et al., 2006); and on critical analysis of ideology to explain why political arrangements that harm health persist or are challenged (Chung & Muntaner, 2008; Schrecker & Bambra, 2025). Important extensions of this tradition have examined how institutional arrangements at the international level produce health inequalities across countries (Beckfield, 2018; Ottersen et al., 2014), how neoliberal globalization operates through specific policy mechanisms to undermine health (Labonté & Schrecker, 2007; Ottersen et al., 2014), and how the political determinants of health function through distinct pathways in different welfare state contexts (Bambra, 2009; Mackenbach, 2019).

But the political economy of health tradition does not stand alone. Health Politics extends this foundation by engaging theoretical traditions from across the social sciences that have been insufficiently applied to health. Historical institutionalism, with its emphasis on path dependence, critical junctures, and policy feedback (Hacker, 2002; Immergut, 1992; Pierson, 2004), offers tools for understanding why health systems develop along particular trajectories and why reform is so difficult (Béland & Cox, 2016; Greer et al., 2021). Power resources theory (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Korpi, 1983) explains cross-national variation through the organizational power of labour and the institutional legacies of past struggles (Chung et al., 2010; Chung & Muntaner, 2006; 2007). Veto player theory (Tsebelis, 2002) and comparative federalism (Greer et al., 2016; Greer et al., 2021) further illuminate how institutional design enables or blocks health-protective change.

Feminist political economy foregrounds care, social reproduction, and gendered power as central to health politics, insisting that the capitalist rationalization of reproductive labour (Federici, 2012) and the contradictions between capital accumulation and care provision (Fraser, 2016; 2022) structure health systems along gendered, racialized, and class lines. At the global scale, world-systems analysis (Arrighi, 1994; Silver, 2003) offers a structural account of how core–periphery dynamics and unequal exchange produce and reproduce health inequalities, yet remains largely untapped in health research. Decolonial scholarship challenges whose knowledge counts, exposing how the foreign gaze, institutional coloniality, and the marginalization ofFeminist political economy foregrounds care, social reproduction, and gendered power as central to health politics, insisting that the capitalist rationalization of reproductive labour (Federici, 2012) and the contradictions between capital accumulation and care provision (Fraser, 2016; 2022) structure health systems along gendered, racialized, and class lines. At the global scale, world-systems analysis (Arrighi, 1994; Silver, 2003) offers a structural account of how core–periphery dynamics and unequal exchange produce and reproduce health inequalities, yet remains largely untapped in health research. Decolonial scholarship challenges whose knowledge counts, exposing how the foreign gaze, institutional coloniality, and the marginalization of Indigenous and experiential knowledge are fundamentally questions of power in global health (Abimbola, 2019; Abimbola & Pai, 2020; Fricker, 2007; Richardson, 2020). The journal also engages political sociology’s attention to social movements, counter-hegemonic struggles, and the politics of knowledge production (Brown et al., 2004; Epstein, 2016). Together, these traditions provide theoretical infrastructure for a journal that takes power seriously at every level of analysis, from the workplace to the welfare state to the world system.

A central ambition of Health Politics is to strengthen the methodological foundations of health politics research—particularly in causal inference, where the field has been notably weaker than neighbouring disciplines (Angrist & Pischke, 2009; Cunningham, 2021). The political economy of health has produced landmark comparative analyses, but much of this work has relied on cross-national correlations, welfare state typologies, and descriptive case comparisons that, while theoretically generative, are vulnerable to confounding, reverse causation, and selection bias (Mackenbach, 2019). Meanwhile, quantitative political science and economics have developed a sophisticated toolkit for causal identification that has been under-utilized in health politics (Athey & Imbens, 2017).

Our Methods series will commission work applying these tools to health politics questions. Difference-in-differences designs can exploit the staggered adoption of labour protections or social insurance expansions across jurisdictions to estimate causal effects on health outcomes (Goodman-Bacon, 2021; Roth et al., 2023), while synthetic control methods construct counterfactual trajectories for units exposed to major policy shocks (Abadie, 2021). Regression discontinuity designs, instrumental variables strategies, and natural experiments—constitutional changes, court rulings, electoral discontinuities—offer further avenues for causal identification (Dunning, 2012).

This quantitative edge does not imply methodological hierarchy. Qualitative and interpretive approaches are equally central to the journal’s mission. We value process tracing, comparative-historical analysis, qualitative comparative analysis, realist evaluation, ethnographic and participatory research, and mixed-methods designs (Beach & Pedersen, 2019; Byrne & Callaghan, 2022), as well as computational approaches—text-as-data, network analysis, and agent-based modelling—that open new frontiers for the field. The point is to raise standards across the board—to ensure that health politics claims are grounded in evidence capable of supporting them.

The journal publishes original research articles; theoretical and conceptual articles; review articles; short reports including data and code notes; policy and practice articles including policy dossiers that reconstruct how specific political processes produced health-relevant outcomes; perspectives, debates, and commentaries; and book reviews. A dedicated Methods series commissions methodological innovations for studying power and institutions. A National Health Politics series commissions country-level analyses examining how political institutions, power relations, and policy legacies shape health systems and health equity across diverse national contexts. A Forum model, beginning in Year 2 and organized by Forum Convenors drawn from the editorial board, convenes thematic clusters building cumulative knowledge on priority themes.

Health Politics operates as Gold Open Access with no article processing charges during the launch period, funded by Korea University’s Division of Health Policy and Management. All research manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review, with desk decisions targeted within ten days and full review within 90 to 120 days. Detailed author guidelines, conflict of interest safeguards, and submission procedures are available at hpolitics.org.

The journal is committed to four principles that follow directly from its intellectual commitments. First, equity and epistemic justice: the journal’s engagement with decolonial scholarship and feminist political economy (see above) demands more than rhetorical inclusion. We pursue proactive authorship diversity, Global South leadership in editorial governance, and recognition of multiple knowledge forms—including Indigenous, experiential, and practitioner knowledge that dominant research paradigms have systematically marginalised.

Second, transparency and rigour: the quantitative edge described above requires corresponding standards of evidence. We encourage preregistration where relevant, require open data and code for empirical work, and maintain comprehensive conflict of interest disclosure—recognising that studying power demands particular vigilance about the interests shaping research itself.

Third, policy relevance without advocacy capture: the journal maintains clear distinctions between evidence, interpretation, and normative claims. Research that serves democratic deliberation is not the same as research that serves a predetermined policy position.

Fourth, research ethics in crisis contexts: several priority domains—conflict, migration, climate displacement—involve populations under duress, where standard ethical protocols may be insufficient. The journal requires heightened protections for research in conflict settings and under time pressure.

The following cases illustrate the range of political processes, levels of analysis, and crisis conditions within the journal’s scope. Each demonstrates how specific political mechanisms—executive discretion, geopolitical power, federal coordination, corporate lobbying—produce health outcomes through identifiable causal pathways. Together they span domestic and global scales, state and corporate power, and the planetary, technological, and social transformations that define the current moment.

In January 2026, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a directive reducing the number of diseases targeted by universally recommended childhood vaccines from seventeen to eleven, bypassing the established deliberative process of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]'s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Vaccines previously recommended for all children—including those for rotavirus, hepatitis A and B, influenza, and RSV—were reclassified to high-risk or shared clinical decision-making categories. The directive was issued without ACIP review or public comment, and followed months of escalating political intervention in vaccine policy (KFF, 2026).

The mechanisms linking this decision to health outcomes are multiple and identifiable: trust erosion as public health authority is undermined by partisan signalling, reducing the legitimacy of all public health guidance; misinformation amplification as the decision provides material for anti-vaccine movements distributed through algorithmically curated platforms; provider confusion as physicians face contradictory guidance; and the institutional precedent—a demonstrated capacity of executive power to override scientific advisory processes—that creates a chilling effect on future recommendations. A federal court subsequently issued a preliminary injunction staying the revised schedule, but the episode had already demonstrated how rapidly administrative action can restructure prevention infrastructure without legislation (KFF, 2026).

This case reveals that trust and legitimacy are themselves health infrastructure, accumulated over decades and destroyable through political decisions. It opens research questions about the political determinants of trust, institutional safeguards against scientific capture, and causal pathways from polarization to health behaviours (Jamison et al., 2019; Kennedy et al., 2022)—questions amenable to difference-in-differences designs exploiting cross-state variation and comparative analysis of how institutional arrangements buffer political shocks.

The ongoing conflict in Gaza illustrates how geopolitical power, international law, and humanitarian governance become direct determinants of population survival. Israeli government restrictions on humanitarian aid, combined with international actors’ decisions about coordination and legal battles over protection obligations, have produced a cascading catastrophe in which political and bureaucratic decisions—permit denials, border closures, supply restrictions—mediate between military action and civilian health outcomes.

The mechanisms are both direct and structural. Military operations cause injury and death, but indirect pathways—aid blockades producing food insecurity, infrastructure destruction degrading water and sanitation, health facility targeting collapsing the healthcare system, overcrowding accelerating infectious disease—account for a growing share of morbidity and mortality (Al-Jadba et al., 2024; Rubenstein, 2021). The convergence of conflict with climate stress—water scarcity, extreme heat—demonstrates the inseparability of planetary, social, and political crises.

This case demonstrates that humanitarian health is a profoundly political problem, shaped by state violence, international law enforcement (or its absence), and global power relations (Abimbola & Pai, 2020; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020). It exemplifies what Mbembe (2003) terms necropolitics—political decisions about who is allowed to live or die—operating through bureaucratic mechanisms as much as direct violence. For the field, it raises questions about the political conditions enabling humanitarian access, the health consequences of sanctions and blockades as measurable through quasi-experimental methods, and the evidentiary standards required in conflict settings.

The 2023 Canadian wildfire season exposed how political fragmentation, underinvestment in prevention, and unequal protection systems turn climate events into health crises. Federal-provincial jurisdictional disputes delayed emergency coordination. Funding priorities favoured reactive spending over prevention, including land management and Indigenous fire stewardship. Air quality warning systems varied in coverage and accessibility.

Political decisions shaped health outcomes at every stage: differential exposure depended on housing quality and HVAC systems determined by income and housing policy; occupational exposure affected outdoor workers lacking adequate labour protections; healthcare surge capacity varied by region due to decades of investment choices; displacement produced cascading mental health impacts; and long-term PM2.5 exposure accelerated chronic disease. The result was a documented surge in respiratory emergency department visits and hospitalizations across affected provinces, with mortality concentrated among the elderly, outdoor workers, people experiencing homelessness, those with pre-existing conditions, and Indigenous communities disproportionately affected (Cascio, 2018; Chen et al., 2025; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023; Public Health Agency of Canada, 2023).

Climate change is not merely an “environmental exposure” but a politically mediated process at every stage: prevention or not, early warning for whom, protection of whose housing, evacuation priorities, recovery support. Federalism, as a political institution, can either coordinate or fragment disaster response with life-and-death consequences. The case invites research on political determinants of adaptation capacity and the distributional consequences of prevention versus reactive spending.

Regulatory battles over social media and adolescent mental health illustrate how corporate political power shapes the digital determinants of health. Despite Congressional hearings from 2021 to 2024 documenting harms of algorithmic amplification and design features exploiting psychological vulnerabilities in developing brains (U.S. Surgeon General, 2023; World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe, 2025), U.S. platform companies blocked or weakened regulation through combined lobbying expenditures exceeding 60 million USD annually (Issue One, 2025), legal challenges invoking free expression, claims of technical infeasibility, and funding of research supporting industry positions.

The mechanisms are well-documented: algorithms optimized for engagement expose adolescents to harmful content; design features exploit psychological vulnerabilities; microtargeting delivers harmful content to vulnerable users. The consequences include rising adolescent depression (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024; Odgers & Jensen, 2020; Twenge, 2020), increased self-harm and eating disorder diagnoses, and pervasive sleep disruption—with girls and LGBTQ+ youth disproportionately affected.

This is not a technology problem but a governance problem. Technical solutions exist—algorithmic auditing, design modifications, age restrictions—but corporate political power prevents implementation. The contrast between the EU’s Digital Services Act and the U.S.‘s fragmented approach provides a natural experiment in regulatory governance and its health consequences (Gorwa, 2019); (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022), demonstrating that platform governance is health governance and that the commercial determinants of health are fundamentally questions of political economy and regulatory capture.

The cases above illustrate the range of political mechanisms through which health is shaped—from executive discretion to geopolitical power, from federal coordination failures to corporate regulatory capture. The following six priority domains reflect both enduring questions in health politics and emerging challenges posed by converging crises. We particularly encourage research that works across domains—recognizing that climate, technology, corporate power, and inequality are interacting dynamics, not separate silos (Schrecker & Bambra, 2025).

The relationship between political power, social policy, and population health is a founding concern of the political economy of health (Chung & Muntaner, 2006; 2007; Navarro et al., 2006). This domain encompasses two interrelated agendas. The first concerns labour: how labour standards, enforcement regimes, and union density shape occupational injury, mental health, and access to care; what political conditions enable or block protections; and how class relations structure health inequalities through employment (Benach et al., 2014; International Labour Organization, 2023; International Trade Union Confederation, 2024; 2025; Muntaner et al., 2015; Standing, 2011). The second concerns welfare states: how regime types affect population health and health inequalities; what political conditions enable austerity versus social investment; and how welfare states adapt to new social risks (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Greer et al., 2021; Korpi, 1983; Lynch, 2019).

Crisis-era extensions push both agendas in new directions. Just transition frameworks for fossil fuel workers raise questions about green job quality and the politics of retraining (International Labour Organization, 2023; Newell & Mulvaney, 2013). AI-driven algorithmic management creates new tensions around worker autonomy (Geelan, 2021; Kellogg et al., 2020). Social protection for climate-displaced populations positions adaptation as a welfare state function (World Bank, 2022). “Green social policy”—universal services such as public transit and housing retrofits—simultaneously advances climate mitigation and health promotion (Laurent, 2020; United Nations Environment Programme, 2025). And the emerging concept of the “ecological welfare state” asks how social protection can be reconciled with planetary boundaries (Koch, 2022); (Laurent, 2020).

Health systems are structured through political conflicts and compromises. What drives privatization, corporatization, and the politics of rationing, and how do welfare regimes produce different system outcomes (Greer et al., 2016; Greer et al., 2021)? Crisis-era questions include digital health platforms as new terrain of political settlement, where the contest between public data infrastructure and platform capitalism plays out (Morley et al., 2020; World Health Organization, 2025) climate adaptation demands on health system resilience (Romanello et al., 2024) and the pandemic’s lessons about which political conditions enabled rapid system expansion (Greer et al., 2021; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2020). Research on why some countries resist marketization, how federalism shapes health system resilience, and what institutional designs protect capacity under crisis remains open and urgent.

How does corporate political activity shape health regulation—or its absence? What mechanisms enable or constrain regulatory capture (Gilmore et al., 2023; Mialon, 2020; Rodwin, 2011)? Three crisis-era developments define this domain: the fossil fuel industry’s deployment of climate denialism to block health-protective policy (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023; Supran & Oreskes, 2021); technology platforms consolidating control over health data and AI, as the regulatory case above illustrates (Crawford, 2021; Zuboff, 2019); and pharmaceutical monopolies blocking pandemic response through intellectual property maximization ('t Hoen, 2016). This journal reframes the “commercial determinants of health” as fundamentally a question of political economy—of corporate power, its mechanisms, and its contestation (Gilmore et al., 2023; Madureira Lima & Galea, 2018).

Health outcomes are increasingly shaped by geopolitical dynamics—great-power competition, shifting alliances, and the strategic instrumentalization of health in interstate relations (Youde, 2012). The post–World War II multilateral order is under sustained strain, and health diplomacy has become a site of geopolitical competition: vaccine diplomacy, contested pandemic treaty negotiations, and the weaponization of health infrastructure in armed conflict all illustrate how health is embedded in interstate power relations (Eccleston-Turner & Upton, 2021; Storeng et al., 2021).

This domain integrates three dimensions. Geopolitical competition and health governance examines how great-power rivalries reshape WHO governance and pandemic preparedness architectures (Gostin et al., 2020); how financing mechanisms and treaty compliance encode power asymmetries (Chorev, 2012; Ottersen et al., 2014); and what determines North–South equity in international cooperation. Conflict, occupation, and necropolitics addresses how war, sanctions, and blockades affect population health through direct violence and bureaucratic denial (Farmer, 2004; Rubenstein, 2021). Border regimes and migration politics examines how securitization, detention, and differential access function as health determinants for displaced populations (De León, 2015; World Bank, 2022). Climate-induced displacement and supply chain disruption intensify each dimension (Romanello et al., 2024).

The cyclical impact of U.S. executive actions on global health—from the “Mexico City Policy” whose successive reinstatements have been associated with reduced contraceptive prevalence and increased maternal mortality across recipient countries (Brooks et al., 2019; Kavakli & Rotondi, 2022), to PEPFAR reauthorization battles, where partisan conflict over abortion has jeopardized the world’s largest HIV treatment programme (Abdool Karim et al., 2023; Gandhi & Goosby, 2023)—illustrates how a single powerful state’s domestic political cycles redirect funding, disrupt partnerships, and produce health consequences borne disproportionately by the Global South. How geopolitical competition reshapes health governance, how sanctions causally affect health outcomes, what enables humanitarian access, and how health diplomacy functions as geopolitical influence are all questions the field must address.

Trust, expertise, and legitimacy function as health infrastructure—and can be dismantled as rapidly as physical infrastructure (Kennedy et al., 2022; SteelFisher et al., 2023). The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how partisan polarization translates directly into divergent health behaviours and mortality patterns, even within the same national context (Van Bavel et al., 2020). The digital transformation compounds these dynamics: AI-generated misinformation amplifies disinformation at scale, but AI-enabled platforms also open new possibilities for democratic governance and collective intelligence (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2020; World Health Organization, 2025). Epistemic justice demands attention to whose knowledge counts in policy—including Indigenous knowledge, experiential knowledge, and community expertise that dominant research paradigms have systematically marginalized (Fricker, 2007; Richardson, 2020). How political polarization affects health behaviours across issues and countries (Oberlander, 2024; Van Bavel et al., 2024), what builds public health trust amid misinformation (Ishizumi et al., 2024; SteelFisher et al., 2023), and whether participatory technology can strengthen democratic health governance (Landemore, 2020; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2020) are questions at the intersection of political science and public health that few existing outlets are equipped to address.

If power is central to health politics, then methods for measuring and analyzing power are critical infrastructure for the field. This domain encompasses causal inference strategies for political institutions and health (Goodman-Bacon, 2021; Hernán & Robins, 2020); measurement of corporate influence and regulatory capture (Mialon, 2020; Rodwin, 2011); algorithm auditing and digital power metrics (Kellogg et al., 2020; Morley et al., 2020); systems transitions analysis (Kanger et al., 2020); participatory methods (Bussu et al., 2022); and rapid-response research for crises (Greer et al., 2021; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2020). The journal’s dedicated Methods series will commission leading scholars to advance these tools and demonstrate their application to health politics questions.

We opened this editorial by describing the present moment as an interregnum—a period in which the post–World War II institutional order and its neoliberal successor are fracturing, but no coherent alternative has consolidated. The planetary, technological, and social transformations we outlined are not predetermined crises with automatic outcomes; they are contested processes whose direction depends on political power, institutional design, and collective action. The four cases examined in this editorial—executive capture of vaccination policy, the politics of survival in Gaza, climate disaster governance in Canada, and platform regulation of adolescent mental health—illustrate that openings cut both ways: the same institutional fluidity that enables democratic innovation also permits authoritarian capture, corporate entrenchment, and the dismantlement of hard-won protections. What determines the direction is politics.

The political economy of health tradition established this insight against considerable resistance—demonstrating that welfare state institutions, labour market regimes, and class relations shape population health as fundamentally as any biomedical exposure. But the interregnum demands more than the tradition has yet delivered: causal mechanisms specified with the precision that political science now expects, institutional analysis at the granularity that comparative politics demands, and engagement with challenges—platform power, planetary crisis, democratic erosion—that the founding generation could not have anticipated. Yet interregnums are also periods of institutional invention, and the analytical tools to meet this moment now exist. Health Politics exists to bring them together.

To political scientists: health is too important to remain at the margins of your discipline. The most urgent questions of our time—climate change, inequality, democracy under threat—all have profound health dimensions. Bring your theoretical sophistication and methodological tools to these challenges.

To public health scholars: politics is not peripheral to your work—it is central. Engage with political theory, power analysis, and institutional research. Your epidemiological rigour combined with political understanding can transform how we address health inequities.

To sustainability scientists, STS scholars, and those working across disciplines: climate transitions are health transitions. Technology governance is health governance. Your frameworks are essential for health politics.

To scholars whose voices have been marginalized in global health research—whether by geography, language, career stage, institutional position, or epistemic tradition: your perspectives must be centred, not peripheralised. This journal is yours to shape.

To activists, practitioners, and policymakers: your experiential knowledge of political struggle, policy implementation, and health system realities is invaluable. Share your insights; challenge our assumptions; hold us accountable to the communities whose health is at stake.

Because political processes are upstream causes of health—not background context, not one variable among many, but the arena in which every other determinant is organised, contested, and given force. Because the converging transformations of our time—planetary, technological, social—are making political configurations more decisive for health than at any point in living memory. Because the analytical tools to study these processes rigorously exist but have not been systematically brought together in a single scholarly home. And because the decisions made in the coming decade—about climate response, digital governance, social protection, and international cooperation—will shape health outcomes for generations, and those decisions deserve the most rigorous analysis we can bring to bear.

This journal exists to provide that analysis: to illuminate the political processes that shape health, to strengthen democratic responses to converging crises, and to advance health justice through scholarship that is theoretically grounded, methodologically rigorous, and politically engaged. We envision landmark debates at the nexus of climate, health, and justice; methods standards for studying power; and a scholarly community that bridges disciplines, regions, and career stages.

An interregnum, by definition, will not last. What replaces it depends on the knowledge, the coalitions, and the political imagination we build now.

We invite you to join us.

Notes

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