Dr. Joseph Harris Publishes New Article, “The Politics of Expanding Healthcare Access to the Poor and Informal Sectors.”

GDP Center Faculty Affiliate Joseph Harris recently published an article in Sociological Forum about how the politics of agenda setting and policy adoption operate in the arena of healthcare reform in the industrializing world. The paper, entitled “The Politics of Expanding Healthcare Access to the Poor and Informal Sectors,” examines the politics of policy adoption in countries that have recently aimed to provide healthcare access and financial protection to the poor and people in the informal sector in Mexico and Turkey. He finds that democratic competition plays an important role in causing political parties to take up new agendas.

In addition to the publication of this paper, Harris recently attended a workshop on Medical Dominance in Global Health at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center on October 24-25. The workshop featured other leading scholars of global health, including Nitsan Chorev and Stefan Elbe.

Dr. Joseph Harris is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. He conducts comparative historical research that lies at the intersection of sociology, political science, and global health. He is author of Achieving Access: Professional Movements and the Politics of Health Universalism (Cornell University Press, 2017). He has earned two Fulbright awards for his research on health policy in Thailand, serves as Associate Editor at Social Science and Medicine, and is a member of the governing Council of the ASA Section on the Sociology of Development. He received his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds a Master’s in Public Affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.