Artificial intelligence is reshaping how healthcare is financed, organised, and delivered, yet its study remains dominated by ethical and technical framings that treat adoption as a question of design, safety, or efficiency. This panel repositions health AI within the political determinants of health (PDoH) framework, asking how power, political traditions, and policy (not technology alone) shape whether, how, and for whom AI in care is adopted, and with what consequences for health equity and the welfare state.
The PDoH tradition holds that population health is patterned by the distribution of political power, the ideological character of governing coalitions, and the welfare-state policies they enact. The panel extends this lens to the uptake of health AI. How do partisan power and welfare-regime type structure divergent trajectories of adoption? How do governing traditions for example social-democratic, Christian-democratic, liberal, post-authoritarian states, translate the same technology into distinct policy pathways? How do supranational and national regulatory regimes, like the EU AI Act, human rights law, data protection legislations, etc mediate these dynamics and their distributional effects? And how does health AI itself become a political determinant of health - reproducing, or reshaping, the inequalities the framework was built to explain?
The panel welcomes comparative and single-country studies, approaches ranging from institutional and political-economy comparison to party-system and discourse analysis and quantitative policy assessment. Cases from any regime type or health system are encouraged.
Collectively, the panel will aim to consolidate a research agenda that treats health AI not just as an exceptional ethical problem but also an object of pure political inquiry and political determinant of health in its own right — shaped by power, politics, and policy, and consequential for the distribution of health within and between welfare states.
