Global Health

If you were directed here from the Washington Post article on Electoral Rules and COVID-19, please access the dataset here. More detail on New Zealand here. For note on erratum on Japan, see here.

For my other work on Global Health, please see the following:

COVID-19:

Electoral Rules and COVID-19 Responses in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Washington Post, May 2020.

Veto Players and COVID-19 Responses in Southeast Asia. Forthcoming in Foreign Policy.

Universal Healthcare and Healthcare Systems:

Coalitions of the Wellbeing. How Electoral Rules and Ethnic Politics Shape Health Policy in Developing Countries

 (2015). Cambridge University Press.

Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, Direct from CUP, Google Play, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, and many other good booksellers across the world.

Coalitions of the Wellbeing primarily focuses on Middle Income Countries' level of success in creating efficient healthcare systems. It contains detailed cases on Thailand, Mauritius, Malaysia, and Botswana.

The book's main thesis is that we must look beyond medical solutions to solve the world's most urgent health problems. Developing countries have access to adequate medical and public health knowledge, and often work with the World Health Organization and other international partners. Efforts to reform the health system, rather, are hampered by the incentives policymakers face in obtaining and maintaining power. They key question is whether politicians have incentives to create broad coalitions that cut across ethnic groups and geographic regions or not. In some countries, the structure of political contests is local--by individuals in geographically-small districts. In other countries, the political institutions require votes to be cast for political parties at the national level. A country's social structure interacts with these formal political rules by further shaping the effective breadth of coalitions: highly diverse countries with ethnic groups isolated in their own regions are particularly difficult to incentivize broad coalition-making. This incentive structure maps on to the nature of policymaking: countries with narrow coalitions target government resources narrowly--in districts where electoral competition is tight, in politicians' local constituencies, or towards one's ethnic group; in countries with broad coalitions, government resources are respectively broad. The nature of coalitions affects not just the size of the budget, but how it is spent. Narrow coalitions tend to spend money on short-term health goods that can bring them political payoffs: quick and small infrastructure projects (hospital wards or health centers), or bloated government contracts directed at political supporters--anything from ambulances to medical supplies. Broad coalitions are more likely to institute universal healthcare systems since they are the most cost-effective way to benefit large swathes of the population.

The Thai Case:

"Electoral Reform and Public Policy Outcomes in Thailand: The Politics of the 30-Baht Health Scheme" (2011) World Politics 63(1): 165-202.

"Forcing the Genie Back in the Bottle: Sociological Change and Institutional Reform in Thailand." (2012) Journal of East Asian Studies 12 (no. 1): 57-88. (with A. Hicken)

"Exchange: Explaining the Passage of Universal Healthcare in Thailand." (2020). Journal of East Asian Studies 20 (no. 1):99-119. (with Joseph Harris)

Quantitative Analysis:

Electoral Rules and Social Structure: Determinants of Health in Democracies (under review)