Professions, Data, and Political Will: From the Pandemic Toward a Political Science with Public Health

Abstract

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic promised to teach us many things. One of the things it can help to teach us is about ways to do political science with public health. A political science with public health can work best if informed by a broad social-scientific understanding of both fields. This chapter, therefore, takes its inspiration from not just political science but also sociology and Science and Technology Studies, a field which focuses on the social construction of facts and their flow through society. The chapter focuses on three issues that seem to be particular causes of disciplinary misunderstanding and potentially fruitful research. The first is the professional authority of public health as a profession, including the extent to which it has a clear domain of expertise that others in government and academia respect. The second is the politics of data. Data are endogenous to the political process because the collection and coding of data of any kind are political decisions. The experience showed the potential value of viewing statistics as a dependent variable. The third is of the most contested concepts that can be found at the border of public health and political science: political will.