Health has moved up on the political agendas of most governments around the globe. The interdependence of economic, environmental and social conditions and health is increasingly understood. In turn, the experiences in health promotion with building healthy public policies become more important. Future "health in all policies" efforts, however, need to consider changing political contexts. Ther...

Does popular ideology affect public policies enacted in a country? The baseline argument links popular ideology input to policy output. Either a population more often elects a party with its favored ideology into office, which then implements policies in line with popular ideology. Alternatively, all parties pursue policies more in line with popular ideology. Under the first view, popular ideol...

This paper econometrically analyzes the relationship between public spending and gendered urban employment in China for the period 1999-2009. Proponents of gender-sensitive public policies suggest that spending on healthcare and education may increase long-run growth and women’s relative employment via the expansion of paid care work (increasing labor demand) and reductions in unpaid labor (inc...

Health care spending estimates constitute an important public policy tool, providing a broad look at historical trends in unique State health care systems. The State health expenditure estimates presented here detail spending for the 50 States and the District of Columbia for calendar years 1980-1998. They include expenditure estimates for specific service types as well as for two major sources...

Written by a group of political science researchers, this commentary focuses on the contributions of political science to public health and proposes research avenues to increase those contributions. Despite progress, the links between researchers from these two fields develop only slowly. Divergences between the approach of political science to public policy and the expectations that public hea...

This paper explores the social and political imperatives in the sphere of public policy relating to social justice. In India, the colonial legacy and post-colonial social and political pressures sustained the appropriation of ‘caste’ category in allocating public resources to the backward class of citizens. For several reasons, ‘economic’ category could not be placed in allocating resources. Th...

Healthy public policy plays an essential role in a comprehensive public health approach to preventing cancer and chronic disease. Public policies spread through the 'policy diffusion' process, enabling governments to learn from another's enacted policy solutions. The Prevention Policies Directory (the Directory), an online database of municipal, provincial/territorial, and federal cancer and ch...

Public policy decisions in both the social and economic spheres have enormous impact on global public health. As a result of this, and of the skewed global distribution of power and resources, health impact assessment (HIA) potentially has a key role to play in foreign policy-making and global public policy-making. Governments, multilateral bodies and transnational corporations need to be held ...

BACKGROUND Decision-makers tend to make connections with researchers far too late in the game of public policy, expecting to find a retail store in which researchers are busy filling shop-front shelves with a comprehensive set of all possible relevant studies that a decision-maker might some day drop by to purchase. This linear type of relation between research and policy needs to be replaced b...