Abstract
The health of humanity varies enormously: by genetic endowment, environmental conditions, and access to health care; by age, gender, income level, and country.1 Some people live long healthy lives in peace and affluence; many others’ lives are briefer and burdened by major disabilities from disease or injury, and often the characterization “nasty, brutish, and short” is all too apt. Our central claim in this chapter is that politics plays an important role in influencing public health conditions, but unfortunately political scientists and other scholars have only conducted limited systematic research on the topic.2 As a result, the existing literature on the comparative cross-national analysis of the determinants of public health performance is largely based on the work of economists and public health experts in which political processes and conditions are understudied.3 We believe that political scientists can contribute substantially to a better understanding of why public health conditions vary in systematic ways across countries.
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Notes
Bruce Moon, The Political Economy of Basic Human Needs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)
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In this we respond to the call of Gary King and Christopher Murray, “Rethinking Human Security,” Political Science Quarterly 117 (Winter 2002), 585–610
Thomas Zweifel and Patricia Navia, “Democracy, Dictatorship, and Infant Mortality,” Journal of Democracy 11 (April 2000), 99–114.
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Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946–1986,” American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993), 624–38.
See Ted Robert Gurr, Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2000).
Tatu Vanhanen, “Domestic Ethnic Conflict and Ethnic Nepotism: A Comparative Analysis,” Journal of Peace Research 36 (January 1999), 55–73.
Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflict (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1993).
Nicole Ball, Security and Economy in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988)
Alex Mintz, “Guns versus Butter,” American Political Science Review 83 (December 1989), 1285–93
United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 1996 Revision (New York: United Nations, 1998), 132–35.
Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett, “Civil Wars Kill and Maim People—Long after the Shooting Stops,” American Political Science Review 97 (May 2003), 189–202
Paul Collier, “On the Economic Consequences of Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 51 (1999), 168–83
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© 2006 Bruce Russett
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Ghobarah, H.A., Huth, P. (2006). Comparative Public Health: The Political Economy of Human Misery and Well-Being. In: Purpose and Policy in the Global Community. Advances in Foreign Policy Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10058-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10058-0_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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