Answer to the commentary: Politics and public health—some conceptual considerations concerning welfare state characteristics and public health outcomes

Extract

We appreciate the detailed analysis of our paper¹ by Olle Lundberg,² including his criticisms, even though many are unfair and unwarranted. Lundberg takes us to task for emphasizing politics rather than policies in our quest to understand health outcomes. He also erroneously assumes that we ignore the context in which politics occurs. He writes that Sweden and Austria, for example, have been governed by social democratic parties for long periods of time and yet have different welfare states, and he presents this as proof of how wrong it can be to take politics and years in government of a political party as a predictor of the type of welfare state or health outcomes. Moreover, he adds that welfare state regimes behave differently with respect to social transfers vs public services, and that this makes it difficult to determine the impact of politics on welfare states and health outcomes.^3,4 Finally, Lundberg² concludes that politics is of even less value when we try to understand health inequalities.