Comparative health policy goes qualitative: Broadening the focus of research after COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed health policy frontstage and exposed the stark differences in government capacities to respond to the crisis. This has created new demands for comparative heath policy to support knowledge creation on a large scale. However, comparative health policy has not necessarily been well prepared; studies have focused on health systems and used typologies together with descriptive, quantitative methods. This makes it difficult to capture the multi-level nature of health policy, the diverse actors involved and the many societal facets of governance performance. We argue for broadening the perspective to include health policy as a bottom-up process with diverse interests. This calls for expanding the methodology of comparative health policy by also using approaches that make greater use of explorative, qualitative research. We introduce possible developmental pathways to illustrate what this may look like. The Pan-European Commission shows how to broaden the definition of comparative health policy, notably as transnational and planetary. The gender analysis matrix illustrates how comparative health policy can strengthen its assessment of performance by focussing on gender equity. The street-level bureaucrat framework highlights how analysing frontline work can help conduct small-scale bottom-up comparisons of health policy. Together, these developmental pathways demonstrate the potential to broaden comparative health policy towards greater responsiveness to the societal performance of governments, such as social inequalities created by the COVID-19 pandemic. This also opens opportunities for strengthening the global outlook of comparative health policy.