Politics, Political Science and the Pandemic

Abstract

Health systems research as a field has increased its attention to political factors that shape health system development. However, there has been a lack of consensus about which conceptual frameworks and models from the academic discipline of political science are most relevant to the study of health systems. The COVID-19 pandemic underlined the centrality of politics to health, but it also demonstrated the limitations of existing frameworks used to analyze the politics of health. This article reviews the political science literature on the politics of COVID-19, identifies several gaps in the theoretical frameworks used in this work, and draws some conclusions for future work on the politics of pandemics and the politics of health system development writ large.

Keywords

• Politics of health
• COVID-19
• pandemics
• political science