Toward a New Political Sociology of Health

Following the ongoing “institutional turn” in sociology that highlights the power of institutional arrangements (or “rules of the games”) in explaining social inequality and stratification (Beckfield 2018: 11), emerging scholarship within the study of the social determinants of health examines the role of politics in shaping health and health inequalities. Indeed, social determinants of health such as income, education, housing, and health care and how they are distributed are political (Torche and Rauf 2021). They also produce varying impacts not only across political settings but also across social groups within a society (Coburn 2000). Currently, however, the study of political determinants of health has a dominant focus on the consequences of macro-level political factors such as democratic institutions, welfare state, political traditions, and health care systems (Navarro and Shi 2001; Beckfield and Krieger 2009; Patterson and Veenstra 2016). Questions such as “what explain the formation of the political institutions that matter for health?” and “how do political institutions affect the quality and distribution of social causes of health?” are largely overlooked.

In this session, we welcome conceptual, theoretical, and traditional empirical research papers that build upon the recent development in political sociology but advance it in new directions. Papers that engage with the following themes are especially welcome.

• Patterns of political contexts of health
• Political causes of social conditions of health
• Social causes of political determinants of health