Comparing Health Policy: An Assessment of Typologies of Health Systems VIOLA BURAU* and ROBERT H. BLANK** *University of Aarhus, Denmark; **New College of Florida, USA and University of Canterbury, New Zealand ABSTRACT Typologies have been central to the comparative turn in public policy and this paper contributes to the debate by assessing the capacity of typologies of health systems to capture the institutional context of health care and to contribute to explaining health policies across countries. Using a recent comparative study of health policy and focusing on the concept of the health care state the paper suggests three things. First, the concept of the health care state holds as a set of ideal types. Second, as such the concept of the health care state provides a useful springboard for analyzing health policy, but one which needs to be complemented by more specific institutional explanations. Third, the concept of the health care state is less applicable to increasingly important, non-medical areas of health policy. Instead, different aspects of institutional context come into play and they can be combined as part of a looser ‘‘organizing framework’’. Comparative policy analysis has become a ‘‘growth industry’’. Advances in information technology have expanded the availability and dissemination of data across many countries, while at the same time many policy fields have become increasingly internationally oriented. The greater interest in information about policies in other countries has also been fostered by the perception of shared policy challenges arising from economic and welfare state crises. Deleon and Resnick-Terry (1999) refer to this development as the ‘‘comparative renaissance’’. The comparative perspective is now widely used in both the academic field of public policy analysis and in more applied policy studies (see for example Castles 1999, Heidenheimer et al. 1992). Parallel to discussions about the insights generated by comparative analyses is a debate about the methodologies of cross-country comparison (for comparative Viola Burau is Associate Professor in Public Policy at the University of Aarhus in Demark. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests lie in comparative health policy, the politics and policies of care work and the governance of expertise. She has published on the occupational governance of nursing, the politics of health care reform and local policy making in elderly care. Together with Robert H. Blank she has also written a book on Comparative Health Policy (Palgrave, 2004). She currently co-ordinates an international research project on the new governance of medical performance. Robert H. Blank is currently a Research Scholar at the New College of Florida and Visiting Professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Maryland. Research interests focus on comparative health policy, reproductive policy and biomedical technology assessment. He has published 35 books including: New Zealand Health Policy (Oxford, 1994), The Price of Life (Columbia, 1997), Brain Policy (Georgetown, 1999), End of Life Decision Making: A Comparative Study (MIT Press, 2005) and with Viola Burau, Comparative Health Policy (Palgrave, 2004). Correspondence Address: Viola Burau. Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Bartholins Alle´ DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Email: viola@ps.au.dk Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Vol. 8, No. 1, 63 – 76, March 2006 ISSN 1387-6988 Print/1572-5448 Online/06/010063-14 ª 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13876980500513558