In this comment, I build on Shiffman's call for the global health community to more deeply investigate structural and productive power. I highlight two challenges we must grapple with as social scientists carrying out the types of investigation that Shiffman proposes: the politics of challenging the powerful; and the need to investigate types of expertise that have traditionally been thought of...

the formulation of global health policy is political; and all institutions operating in the global health landscape are political. this is because policies and institutions inevitably represent certain values, reflect particular ideologies, and preferentially serve some interests over others. this may be expressed explicitly and consciously; or implicitly and unconsciously. but it’s important t...

The formulation of global health policy is political; and all institutions operating in the global health landscape are political. This is because policies and institutions inevitably represent certain values, reflect particular ideologies, and preferentially serve some interests over others. This may be expressed explicitly and consciously; or implicitly and unconsciously. But it's important t...

a number of individuals and organizations have considerable influence over the selection of global health priorities and strategies. for some that influence derives from control over financial resources. for others it comes from expertise and claims to moral authority—what can be termed, respectively, epistemic and normative power. in contrast to financial power, we commonly take for granted th...

this article agrees with recent arguments suggesting that normative and epistemic power is rife within global health policy and provides further examples of such. however, in doing so, it is argued that it is equally important to recognize that global health is, and always will be, deeply political and that some form of power is not only necessary for the system to advance, but also to try and ...

jeremy shiffman’s editorial appropriately calls on making all forms of power more apparent and accountable, notably productive power derived from expertise and claims to moral authority. this commentary argues that relationships based on productive power can be especially difficult to reveal in global health policy because of embedded notions about the nature of power and politics. yet, it is e...

BACKGROUND The evidence on the association between politics and health is scarce considering the importance of this topic for population health. Studies that investigated the effect of different political regimes on health outcomes show inconsistent results. METHODS Bayesian time-series cross-section analyses are used to examine the overall impact of regional politics on variations in Italian...

Doctors know government and politics like lawyers know medicine—enough to really make a mess of things. Thus, physicians loath to recommend major surgery (especially of debatable benefit) for their patients, eagerly advocate for radical “reform” of our health care system, even though the body politic also bears lifelong scars after disfiguring interventions. Why do doctors, so distrustful of th...

Global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. To arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. But there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, and the actors with the power to set policies may use...