Matthew M. Kavanagh is with the Department of International Health, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Matthew M. Kavanagh and Mara Pillinger are with the Georgetown University O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Washington, DC. Benjamin Mason Meier and Hanna Huffstetler are with the Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Scott Burris is with the Center for Public Health Law Research, Temple University Beasley School of Law, Philadelphia, PA.
Am J Public Health. 2020 Dec;110(12):1805-1810. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2020.305892. Epub 2020 Oct 15.
Throughout the world, laws play an important role in shaping population health. Law making is an intervention with measurable effects yet often unfolds without evaluation or monitoring. Policy surveillance-the systematic, scientific collection and analysis of laws of public health significance-can help bridge this gap by capturing important features of law in numeric form in structured longitudinal data sets.Currently deployed primarily in high-income countries, methods for cross-national policy surveillance hold significant promise, particularly given the growing quality and accessibility of global health data. Global policy surveillance can enable comparative research on the implementation and health impact of laws, their spread, and their political determinants. Greater transparency of status and trends in law supports health policy advocacy and promotes public accountability. Collecting, coding, and analyzing laws across countries presents numerous challenges-especially in low-resource settings.With insights from comparative politics and law, we suggest methods to address those challenges. We describe how longitudinal legal data have been used in limited, but important, ways for cross-national analysis and propose incorporating global policy surveillance into core global public health practice.
在全球范围内，法律在塑造人口健康方面发挥着重要作用。制定法律是一种具有可衡量效果的干预措施，但往往在没有评估或监测的情况下展开。政策监测——系统、科学地收集和分析具有公共卫生意义的法律——可以通过以数字形式在结构化的纵向数据集中捕获法律的重要特征来弥补这一差距。目前主要在高收入国家部署的跨国政策监测方法具有很大的潜力，特别是考虑到全球卫生数据的质量和可及性不断提高。全球政策监测可以实现对法律的实施和对健康的影响、法律的传播及其政治决定因素的比较研究。法律状况和趋势更加透明有助于卫生政策宣传和促进公众问责制。在国家间收集、编码和分析法律存在诸多挑战——尤其是在资源匮乏的环境下。我们借鉴比较政治学和法律学的见解，提出了应对这些挑战的方法。我们描述了纵向法律数据如何在跨国分析中被有限但重要地使用，并提出将全球政策监测纳入核心全球公共卫生实践。
