Introduction: Virchow Revisited on the Importance of Public Health Political Science

Abstract

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the choices governments make to address infectious disease threats are necessarily and inherently informed by both scientific evidence and a host of other social, ethical, and economic considerations. Managing what are often competing goals is the stuff of politics. Because public health is political, it only makes sense to draw on the insights of political science, a discipline that seeks to systematically understand how politics and government work. However, what some have called public health political science is a relatively underdeveloped area, in part because of structural barriers that keep these two disciplines from engaging meaningfully. Thus, the major goals of this book are to provide examples of how political science perspectives can be used to better inform public health; to call on political scientists to learn from and engage in public health; and to advance the interconnection of public health and political science as scholarly disciplines. This chapter briefly explores the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of this emergent field and provides a summary sketch of the individual chapters.