Faculty Research Fellow Joseph Harris Publishes Paper on Expanding Healthcare Access in Developing Countries

Joseph Harris, an assistant professor of Sociology and a Faculty Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently published a new paper exploring healthcare reform in the developing world. The paper, published in the journal Sociological Forum, is titled “The Politics of Expanding Healthcare Access to the Poor and Informal Sectors”

In the paper, Prof. Harris examines the politics surrounding healthcare policy adoption in Mexico and Turkey — two countries that recently aimed to provide access to the poor and people in the informal sector. As expected, he finds that democratic competition played an important role in parties’ agenda-setting. However, contrary to power resources theory, he found that right-leaning political parties in these countries played large roles in the adoption of these policies, while left-leaning parties and labor unions opposed reform.

Read the paper here.

As a Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow, Prof. Harris convened the First Symposium on Global Health and the Social Sciences, bringing together anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists working on global health from around the nation and world. The two-day gathering, which took place in November 2017, was intended to expose participants to colleagues from other disciplines, to new ideas, and to provide the opportunity for scholars to create new research pathways and chart new agendas in conference sessions with both disciplinary and interdisciplinary themes.