Lives matter. Do votes? Invited commentary on “Black lives matter: Differential mortality and the racial composition of the U.S. electorate, 1970-2004”
Racial health disparities in the United States are produced and perpetuated through public policies that differentially allocate risks and resources for health. Elected officials have the ability modify the structural determinants of racial health disparities through policy decisions and, through voting, the electorate can influence the extent to which these policy decisions promote health equity. In this commentary, I synthesize research on the voting behavior of electorates and policy decisions and present strategies to foster sociopolitical environments that are conducive to the implementation and enforcement of racial health disparity reduction initiatives. There is a need for research that contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the role of voting in health policy making processes and further development of empirically-based policy advocacy strategies.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 9. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 18 February 2016.
All research outputs
#4,774,533
of 28,833,811 outputs
Outputs from Social Science & Medicine
#4,541
of 12,826 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#52,397
of 283,622 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Social Science & Medicine
#65
of 99 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 28,833,811 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 83rd percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 12,826 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.9. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 64% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 283,622 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 81% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 99 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 34th percentile – i.e., 34% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
