Populism and Health Policy Expenditures in Times of Crisis

• In Event: Health Policy Elites in a Populist Age: Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Long-term developments of health care expenditures and the situational pressure following the economic crisis starting in 2008 created a call for action upon national governments and led to major reforms in the EU (Bandelow et al. 2017). The resulting policies led to a broad range of and partly even opposite outcomes: an increased or decreased share of public spending on health (Karanikolos et al. 2013). Oddly though, countries that were considered as severely affected by the crisis showed different extremes of policy outcomes, which resulted also in societal challenges such as in Greece (Ifanti et al. 2013). At the same time, the relation of public and private shares of health expenditures is dynamic and its explanation requires accounting for both sides. Using the lens of six perspectives on public policy research (Schmidt 1993), this paper analyses the conditions under which the relation of public and private shares of health expenditures within the European Union member states changed after the financial crisis. Why did similar policy instruments lead to opposite outcomes? After scanning the policy instruments used in the aftermath of the crisis, the article relies on political, historical, institutional, socio-economic, international, and corporatist conditions to explain the changing expenditure patterns. Applying fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Ragin 2009) enables the identification of multiple patterns leading to a certain development of expenditures, the generation of new hypotheses to be tested in single case studies, and the explanation of different strategies in health policy after the crisis.


References

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Authors

• Johanna Hornung, TU Braunschweig

• Nils C. Bandelow, TU Braunschweig