How I See the World
Through my personal and professional experiences, I have come to understand health as the interplay between biology, behavior, and sociopolitical structures, all balanced in a self-reinforcing cycle.

Consequently, I study both parts of the feedback loop: how policies shape people’s health and experiences with public programs — and how those experiences, in turn, motivate people’s political behaviors.

We can summarize my research in 3 key points:

  1. When people get sick, they become alienated from public institutions meant to support health, such as government.

  2. When people get sick, they tend to vote less. But those who continue to vote often support extremist parties.

  3. Affirming experiences with health systems and other public institutions can bring people back into mainstream politics.

On this page, I highlight several of my research publications that illustrate this interplay. My full body of work can be read here.

When people get sick, they become alienated from
public institutions meant to support health.

Picture

Source: N.M. Kavanagh, A. Menon. Health as a driver of political participation and preferences: Implications for policy makers and political actors. World Health Organization: European Observatory, 2024.
Health is central to people’s lives, but how does it shape their political preferences and behaviors? ​We review decades of research on the relationship between health and politics, finding that declines in health tend to push individuals and their communities to the political extremes. A key mechanism appears to be a loss of trust in public institutions. We conclude with concrete recommendations for health systems and governments.

When people get sick, they tend to vote less. But those who continue to vote often support extremist parties.
Source: N.M. Kavanagh, A. Menon, J.E. Heinze. Does health vulnerability predict voting for right-wing populist parties in Europe? American Political Science Review, 2021, 115(3): 1104–1109.
Why do voters in developed democracies support far-right populist parties? This paper explores whether perceptions of health vulnerability, as measured by self-reported illness and disability, might drive voters to support extremist parties. Using data from over 20 countries in Europe across two decades, we find that they do. These findings suggest that health concerns may be an under-appreciated driver of political extremism.

Affirming experiences public institutions can bring
people back into mainstream politics.
Source: N.M. Kavanagh, J.R. Jolin, A.L. Campbell. The effect of expanding public
health insurance on partisan identification. In submission.
Can transformational policies change fundamental aspects of people’s political identities? In this dissertation paper, we test whether the Affordable Care Act moved Americans into the Democratic Party. Using a careful, causal design, we show that Medicaid expansion produced an enduring 2.7 percentage-point increase in the proportion of adults who identify as Democrats. This amounts to 4 million Democrats in treated states.
You can read more of my research here.