W&L’s Ponce de León Publishes Journal Article on Healthcare Reform Ponce de León's peer-reviewed journal article focuses on the impact of political parties on healthcare reform in Peru.

By Taylor Meeker
October 6, 2021

Zoila Ponce de León, assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, discusses the impact of political parties on healthcare reform in a peer-reviewed journal article recently published by Cambridge University Press.

The article, published in the Journal of Latin American Studies, explores the impact that non-programmatic parties had on the debate and implementation of the healthcare reform in Peru. Just how important it is to understand what leads to unsuccessful healthcare reform has become apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. Peru is the country with the highest mortality rate due to Covid-19 in the world. The Peruvian reform failed to provide widespread effective access to healthcare.

The reform, approved in Peru in 2009 during a right-wing government, deviates from similar regional attempts to expand access to healthcare. Left-wing parties in Peru were fragile, and the political parties were non-programmatic. The majority of the literature has focused on the role of left-wing political parties in developing healthcare reforms, neglecting a focus on countries where right-wing parties have presided over reforms seeking to expand access to healthcare, as was the case in Peru. Ponce de Leon sought to explain the emergence of social policy reform under the weakness of the Left, as well as how the Right promotes the expansion of healthcare access.

Based on original field research, this article demonstrates how parties that lacked core values uniting their leaders and had no commitment to the health reform did not care for the definition of specifications regarding funding and implementation. Instead, technocrats dominated the policy formation process, which, accompanied by the lack of commitment from key political actors, led to poorly specified policy and deficient implementation.

The article is available on the Cambridge University Press website as FirstView: https://cup.org/3kGlmSx

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