The Challenge of Tracking Whales: Lessons from the Study of Changing Health Policy

One would think that whales would be easy to track, particularly when they leave footprints.For similar reasons, one might imagine that the key juncture points in the history of a nation's health policy would be easy to trace.The systems for fi nancing and delivering medical care are so large and their governance arrangements are so public, any important changes ought to leave plenty of tracks in the historical record.These key junctures should be particularly evident to scholars who live in the country in question, because they can draw upon the popular media, personal memory, and family experience, in addition to the typical academic resources.In this issue, we sample the fruits of an ambitious effort to explain these national health policy dynamics.The European Health Policy Group, convened at the London School of Economics and Political Science, took up the challenge of testing theories of policy change, focusing on concepts of policy legacies and path dependencies that have become all the rage in studies of policy development.It was these key juncture points, the events that potentially set each nation's health policy on its distinctive course, that were the whale tracks sought by the scholars involved in this enterprise.This collaboration was unprecedented in several senses: in its common theoretical framework, in the collaboration of economists and political scientists (two disciplines that don't always play well together, at least outside the confi nes of the London School of Economics), in the large number of countries that were studied and the even larger number of distinguished