POLITICAL ECONOMY † Health and Democracy
نویسندگان
چکیده
In spite of the inexorable march of democracy around the globe, just how democratic institutions affect human well-being is open to debate. The evidence that democracy promotes prosperity is neither strong nor robust. Moreover, which aspects of policy making and human well-being are promoted by democracies is still a subject of debate. Even if correlations between democracy and outcome measures can be found, there is an overriding difficulty of interpreting them as causal effects. Whether democracy matters, per se, or simply serves as a proxy for societal and political development presents a difficult problem for research in this area. Thinkers such as Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) have argued that democracy can thrive only when conditions are right. If this is correct, then becoming democratic may serve only as a proxy for these hardto-measure cultural and societal preconditions. This paper explores these issues further by reconsidering the link between democracy and health using panel data from a cross section of countries. The data show a strong (conditional) correlation between life expectancy and democracy. This relationship is robust to controlling for the initial level of human capital as well as political histories. The data also suggest that health policy interventions are superior in democracies.
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