Recently, Rudolf Klein (2018) outlined the conceptual framework of Carolyn Hughes Tuohy's remarkable scholarly book, and described the work's four principal case studies of health care reform strategies, using historical portraits of reform changes and policy continuity in the Netherlands, England, Canada, and the United States. Tuohy's book examined reform windows of opportunity across these cases, and Klein asks how convincing are her explanations for the results? Klein's review concentrates, however, on the NHS cases, his area of greatest expertise.
In reviewing this masterful book I shall focus on the use and abuse of comparative cross-national evidence in the policy world of health and pensions. Accordingly, this brief commentary addresses the place of Tuohy's work in comparative scholarship more generally. Indeed, the question of how Tuohy goes about comparing the national cases she selected turns out to be a challenging scholary inquiry on its own. What explanations and...