Why Health Politics? Power, Institutions, and the Political Determinants of Health in an Age of Converging Crises

Background: Politics—understood as the exercise of power through institutions, ideologies, coalitions, and conflict—is a core determinant of health and health equity. The established institutional order is fracturing, yet no coherent alternative has consolidated. The scale, speed, and stakes of contemporary transformations—planetary, technological, and social—make political configurations more decisive than ever.Problem: Scholarship on health politics remains fragmented across disciplines, theoretically under-developed in its treatment of power relations, and methodologically limited in its capacity for causal inference. Existing journals either publish health politics research as a secondary concern within broader portfolios or lack the editorial infrastructure to integrate the theoretical and methodological traditions the field requires.Aim: To establish Health Politics as a dedicated, interdisciplinary journal for rigorous, policy-relevant research that explains how power, institutions, and political conflict shape health and health equity.Approach: The journal bridges political science, political sociology, political economy, and public health. It is anchored in the political economy of health tradition while engaging mainstream political science theory—from historical institutionalism to power resources theory. It combines methodological pluralism with a quantitative edge, emphasizing causal inference alongside qualitative depth and comparative analysis.Illustrative cases: Four current examples demonstrate how politics shapes health under crisis conditions: the politicization of vaccination policy (executive power and scientific authority), war and humanitarian restrictions in Gaza (geopolitics and necropolitics), climate disaster response in Canada (federalism and environmental justice), and platform power and adolescent mental health (corporate power and digital governance).Contribution: A new scholarly home for power-aware, methodologically rigorous health research that fills a structural gap in the journal landscape.