Race, Health Policy, and Disparities in Political Voice

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

Health policy has considerable power to either reduce or intensify inequalities in health status, economic wellbeing, and political influence. This panel presents research by junior and experienced scholars on the politics that surround health policy decisions in the United States, with a focus on the role of race and implications for inequalities in health and political power.

The papers on this panel contribute to two growing bodies of research on health and inequality. First, one body of research on health and inequality suggests that poor health can undercut political participation, potentially generating a disparity in political influence between those who are well and those who are ill. This finding has crucial implications for health policy in a democracy, but the mechanisms that animate the relationship between health and political participation are not yet well understood. Two papers on this panel explore potential mechanisms. Cydney Marie McGuire and Sarah Gollust examine how individual-level political engagement is impacted by the health conditions that prevail in the county in which one lives, and how such engagement varies by racial group. Katherine McCabe studies whether negative experiences with the American health care system impact attitudes toward government intervention in health care, with a particular exploration of how the answer may differ by race.

Another growing body of research on health and inequality presents evidence that public preferences on health policy are closely tied to racial attitudes. Steven M. Sylvester and Simon Haeder examine the relationship between racism and public preferences on health policy in the context of the Affordable Care Act, including investigating how associating the law closely with President Obama affects public perceptions. They also push research on attitudes about the Affordable Care Act in new directions by examining the impact of priming people to think about what they might lose if the law were to be retrenched.

Vanessa Cruz Nichols engages both of these research areas by examining the impact of information about COVID-19’s disparate racial impacts (versus information about overall COVID-19 death rates) on individuals’ threat appraisal process in relation to the pandemic, including rates of support for stricter mitigation protocols.

Sub Unit

• Division 48: Health Politics & Health Policy

Individual Presentations

• Community Public Health Conditions and Political Participation - Cydney Marie McGuire, University of Minnesota School of Public Health; Sarah E. Gollust, University of Minnesota

• Racial Disparities in Health Care Experiences and Health Policy Attitudes - Katherine McCabe, Rutgers University; Michael Strawbridge, Rutgers University

• Health Reform, Endowment Effects, and Racism: An Experiment with the ACA - Simon F. Haeder, The Pennsylvania State University; Steven M. Sylvester, Utah Valley University

• COVID Does Not Discriminate, Governments Do: Race, Resilience and Resistance - Vanessa Cruz Nichols, Indiana University

Chair

• Julianna Pacheco University of Iowa

Discussants

• Christine Marie Slaughter Princeton University

• Karl Kronebusch CUNY-Baruch College