THE IMPACT OF STIGMA AND POLICY TARGET GROUP CHARACTERISTICS ON POLICY AGGRESSIVENESS FOR HIV/AIDS AND TUBERCULOSIS

Even when low-income countries face similar health threats and are under similar pressure to act from a global community of health organizations and donors, notable variation in the aggressiveness of health policies is apparent. Health policy aggressiveness here is defined as how quickly and comprehensively countries have acted to address these problems. Most previous scholarship on political attention to particular diseases has focused on one issue in one country, with limited work considering why policy adoption and implementation differs across policy target groups, across health issues and across nations. In each of the three papers of this dissertation project I explore what has shaped political attention and policy aggressiveness for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, with particular attention to how issue-related stigma and framing shape how policy target groups are socially constructed, altering policy aggressiveness across target groups (Chapter I), how these factors influence variation in policy aggressiveness across countries (Chapter II), and how they contribute to differences in policy aggressiveness between health issues in South Africa (Chapter II and Chapter III). I use both qualitative and quantitative methods and combine and build on theories of the policy process, international relations, comparative politics, sociology, social psychology, and public health in my analyses. The findings of these three papers help to address the gaps in what we know about policy aggressiveness while also contributing to the development of more refined theory, of new theoretical propositions for research, and of practical insights to be used by advocates and policy makers working on health issues.