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Context: The extent to which health care reforms affect health remains understudied. Health care reforms result in policy outputs that determine provision of medical services, which have consequences for the health of the population. The authors scrutinize this relationship between health policy outputs and population health by focusing on legislative changes implying privatization of health care delivery and finance. They ask the following question: What is the relationship between reforms that privatize health care provision and population health in terms of health outcomes and inequalities? Methods: They answer this question by relying on fixed-effects time-series cross-section models. The authors use an original dataset of health care reforms passed in 36 European countries from 1989 to 2019. Health outcomes are operationalized with measures of subjective health status, unmet health needs, and resulting health inequalities. Findings: Their results show that privatization of health care is associated with higher rates of bad subjective health and unmet health needs several years after the passing of reforms. These effects are stronger for individuals in the lower tiers of income and education, resulting in greater socioeconomic inequalities. Conclusions: The article contributes to conceptualization of the political determinants of health as health policy outputs and a better understanding of the relationship between policy outputs and population health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why was policymaking in the 2015–16 refugee crisis so conflictual, while policymaking in the Ukrainian refugee crisis of 2022 proved consensual? We argue that the crisis situation – the problem pressure, policy-specific institutional context of crisis policymaking at the EU level, and the resulting political pressure – made a crucial difference. Based on a Policy Process Analysis (PPA) dataset that systematically tracks the policy debate, we test and corroborate our argument by comparing the policymaking in two countries that differ sharply in their domestic asylum policies and their attitudes toward the EU: Hungary and Germany. However, the country-specific contexts still make a difference: in spite of the similarity regarding crisis-specific policymaking in the two countries, the policy outcome varies between them, independently of the crisis, as a result of the differences in domestic asylum policies and EU attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do attitudes to refugees vary? An original panel is used in five EU states – France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland – to explain European attitudes towards three groups of refugees following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It is shown that European attitudes to Ukrainian refugees are determined by predispositions to immigration and perceptions of the war and actors involved, with European identity and contact with refugees being relatively unimportant. These findings are validated with dynamic panel models and attitudes towards the Temporary Protection Directive. A 'spill-over' effect is further demonstrated, whereby attitudes to Ukrainian refugees positively affect attitudes to Afghan and Somali refugees, and a declining 'rally-around-the-flag' effect over time. These findings contribute to the literature on attitudinal formation, showing the relative malleability of attitudes to refugees as a function of their embeddedness in broader attitudinal patterns (particularly to immigration and geopolitics), changing context (the different stages of the war), and spill-over from views towards other refugee groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populist radical right (PRR) parties can impact population health through multiple mechanisms, including welfare chauvinistic policies, influencing mainstream parties, and eroding democratic norms. Rinaldi and Bekker survey the literature in order to motivate a wider research agenda. They highlight results from existing studies which show the importance of looking into the impact of PRR parties on welfare policy. This commentary considers some of the areas of research highlighted by the original article, as well as other possibilities for further research. The most important of these is to expand the sample of cases to Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]