Governance of Health

In the frame of the "Governance of Health" project, the IEPI intends to provide a political science view to the understanding of health issues. As an object of study, health is related to several broad themes such as the costs of the health system, the new diffusion channels of pathologies - industrial alimentation or international means of transports -, the aging of the world population, technological innovations in the field of health care - for example pharmacogenetics -, etc. These evolutions, the frame of which is sometimes uncertain, are inseparably cultural, economic, techno-scientific, and political. Therefore, the stake of an analysis of health in the present time rests on the crossing of several perspectives on the same object in order to make intelligible the relationships between interdependent spaces of action: public policy, the pharmaceutical industry, professional medicine, individual consumption, research in molecular biology, media. The research and teaching activities of the IEPI contribute to the overall IRIS project through three complementary perspectives.

Braun Dietmar, Professeur ordinaire
Etienne Julien, Assistant diplômé
Gilardi Fabrizio, Maître-Assistant

Project 1 : Ideas and the Health Policy Mix

Health policy consists of a mix of policy instruments. This fact is seldom problematised. It is generally assumed that policy instruments are chosen rationally to best implement policy objectives, or that they successfully materialize a dominant idea, such as a "policy paradigm". Rather, the health policy mix may derive from a set of coexistent ideas discussed in the process of policy negotiation. Indeed, the process of reform may give room to different ideas. Besides, health policies are influenced by various kinds of ideas, and notably two of them: ideas relating to the governance of health, and ideas relating to its production.
This project studies health policy from the policy ideas perspective, which has been little used on this topic. It also challenges the "paradigmatic" metaphor dominating analyses in terms of ideas.

Contact : Julien Etienne

Project 2: The Diffusion of Health Care Reforms

In recent year most health care systems have undergone significant changes, which have notably increased the role of markets and competition in financing and supplying health care. This project investigates how reforms have been interdependent, or in other words how reforms have diffused across countries as well as, at the Swiss level, across cantons. Through the study of the diffusion of health care reforms, the project addresses both a gap in the political science literature on welfare state reform and a fundamental theoretical issue in comparative politics.

Contact : Fabrizio Gilardi

Project 3: The Change of "Research Regimes": The Case of the Research on the Genome and Genes

The analysis focuses on the research on the genome and genes. The goal is to evaluate how it changes with respect to the organisation of research and agencies promoting research, in comparison with other research regimes. Often, research in genetics is more internationalised, organised at the interface between universities and industry, it raises questions of intellectual property rights, etc.

Contact : Dietmar Braun