Health Politics in Europe

Health Politics in Europe: A Handbook is a major new reference work, which provides historical background and up-to-date information and analysis on health politics and health systems throughout Europe. In particular, it captures developments that have taken place since the end of the Cold War, a turning point for many European health systems, with most post-communist transition countries privatizing their state-run health systems, and many Western European health systems experimenting with new public management and other market-oriented health reforms. Following three introductory, stage-setting chapters, the handbook offers country cases divided into seven regional sections, each of which begins with a short regional outlook chapter that highlights the region's common characteristics and divergent paths taken by the separate countries, including comparative data on health system financing, healthcare access, and the political salience of health. Each regional section contains at least one detailed main case, followed by shorter treatments of the other countries in the region. Country chapters feature a historical overview focusing on the country's progression through a series of political regimes and the consequences of this history for the health system; an overview of the institutions and functioning of the contemporary health system; and a political narrative tracing the politics of health policy since 1989. This political narrative, the core of each country case, examines key health reforms in order to understand the political motivations and dynamics behind them and their impact on public opinion and political legitimacy. The handbook's systematic structure makes it useful for country-specific, cross-national, and topical research and analysis.

Ellen M. Immergut is Professor of Political Science and Head of the Department of Political and Social Science at the European University Institute. She has published on health politics, pension politics, and more generally on welfare state reform and institutionalist theory. She served as Project Leader for the HEALTHDOX Project on the Paradox of Healthcare Futures and as Scientific Programme Coordinator for the transnational research program Welfare State Futures (WSF), which was launched by the New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe (NORFACE). Karen M. Anderson is Associate Professor of Social Policy at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on comparative social policy development, the interaction of labor market policy and social policy, and the impact of Europeanization on national welfare states. She is the author of Social Policy in the European Union (Palgrave, 2015) and the editor (with Ellen M. Immergut and Isabelle Schulze) of the Handbook of West European Pension Politics (Oxford University Press, 2007). Her work has also appeared in Comparative Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, and the Journal of Public Policy. Camilla Devitt is Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department, Trinity College Dublin. She has published on labor immigration and on immigration, integration, labor market, and social policies in Western Europe. Her work has appeared in Social Politics, the Journal of European Social Policy, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies amongst others. She has been a principal investigator in various European projects, most recently in the NORFACE-funded HEALTHDOX: The Paradox of Health State Futures project. Tamara Popic is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and was a postdoctoral researcher for the NORFACE Welfare State Futures project HEALTHDOX: The Paradox of Health State Futures at the University of Lisbon. Popic has published on health politics and public attitudes toward healthcare in Health Policy, the Journal of European Social Policy, the Journal of Social Policy, and Social Policy & Administration. Her first research monograph, Health Reforms in Post-Communist Eastern Europe, is forthcoming with Palgrave.