Democracy, authoritarianism, political conflict, and population health: A global, comparative, and historical approach

摘要

As the relationship between politics and health gains more traction within academia (Klomp & de Haan, 2009; Muntaner et al., 2011; Navarro et al., 2006), researchers are beginning to explore the various dimensions through which political factors and conditions influence population health across time and place. This represents an important shift in the field as we move from asking whether politics matter (yes or no) to considering what specific kinds of political conditions matter and under which circumstances does politics improve or harm health. Although the impact of politics on health was already documented during ancient times in Greece and Rome (Porter, 2006) and emphasized in the 19th century (Engels, 1958[1845]; Virchow, 1848), scholarly work on politics as a macro-social determinanfof population health has been surprisingly slow and uneven within the emerging field of social epidemiology (Bambra, Fox, & Scott-Samuel, 2005; Muntaner, 2002; Muntaner & Lynch, 1999; Navarro & Shi, 2001). Like the myth of Sisyphus, who was forced to push an enormous boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, the relative importance given to the impact of politics on health follows a similar up and down progression.