In this research project, we understand health politics in a comprehensive manner by comparing two often separately treated fields of health – preventive health on the one hand and health care on the other. We ask whether governance and the political capacity of coordination in those two fields do resemble or differ from each other. We assume that political coordination capacity is the result of interactions between a multitude of public and private actors who themselves are influenced by certain governance conditions. By comparing preventive health using the example of tobacco prevention, and health care using the example of pharmaceutical pricing, and by comparing three federal countries (Australia, Germany and Switzerland), each belonging to a distinctive form of health system models, the governance structures and conditions of the political coordination capacity are traced. On the basis of the actor-centred institutionalism we formulate assumptions about the effects of such governance regimes on the political coordination capacity.