Do electoral institutions have an impact on population health?

Wigley, Simon; Akkoyunlu-Wigley, Arzu

doi:10.1007/s11127-010-9686-6

Cited by 37 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Wigley and Akkoyunlu-Wigley (2011), who empirically examine the effect of electoral institutions on health status, report a similar result. They show that the impact of institutions on life expectancy is smaller than that on infant mortality because infant mortality can be improved more easily and cheaply than adult mortality.…”

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confidence: 69%

Ethnic diversity, democracy, and health: Theory and evidence

Kotera

Mizuno

Okada

et al. 2015

Research in Economics

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This paper examines the relationship between ethnic composition, political regimes, and social welfare. We provide a simple model which divides individuals in each ethnic group into two types of individuals: the benevolent and the self-interested. Each individual determines whether or not to run for office. A policy maker, who allocates government budget among ethnic groups, is chosen among the candidates by voting. In a democracy, all individuals can run for office and can vote in the election. In a dictatorship, the right to run for election and the right to vote are limited to a specific ethnic group. We investigate how ethnic diversity affects selection of a politician and the resulting policy choices in democratic and dictatorial regimes. Ethnic composition affects electoral outcome and policy payoff. Thus, individuals' incentive to run for election depends on ethnic composition. The size of ethnic group in power also affects social welfare. Our model derives (1) a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social welfare, both in a democracy with a dominant group and in a dictatorship, and (2) a non-monotonic relationship in a democracy without a dominant group. In the empirical examination, employing health outcomes as the proxy for the social welfare, our theoretical results are supported by evidence from the data of 157 countries.

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confidence: 69%

Ethnic diversity, democracy, and health: Theory and evidence

Kotera

Mizuno

Okada

et al. 2015

Research in Economics

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“…The existing literature has focused mainly on life expectancy and infant and maternal mortality, as well as health funding and quality of services, in order to capture health outcomes (Besley and Kudamatsu 2006;Welander et al 2015;Wigley and Akkoyunlu-Wigley 2011;Franco et al 2004), while a democracy index has been used in most studies as the main explanatory variable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Klomp and De Haan (2009) find a positive relationship between the type of a country's regime and two health measures constructed by the authors (individual health and healthcare sector quality). find that democracies make more funds available for healthcare, while Wigley and Akkoyunlu-Wigley (2011) suggest that there is a positive impact of greater electoral proportionality on life expectancy and infant mortality outcomes. Welander et al (2015) provide empirical evidence that countries with a higher Polity2 democracy score have lower child and infant mortality rates.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democracy and health: Evidence from within-country heterogeneity in the Congo

Windt

Vandoros

2017

Social Science & Medicine

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The literature documents a positive association between democracy and health, and studies supporting this claim have largely relied on cross-country panel analyses. In many developing countries, however, local traditional leaders at the micro-level play a key role in individuals' daily lives while the influence of the national government is largely negligible. In response, this study revisits the relationship between democracy and health using micro-level household data from 816 randomly selected villages in Eastern Congo. We find little or no evidence that health outcomes are better in villages that are governed by elected leaders compared to villages where leaders are not elected. Our data suggest that efforts to improve health outcomes in this setting may need to focus on issues such as gender discrimination and education.

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“…There is also substantial empirical evidence that democracy distributes more to its citizens. The findings are robust across sev-eral different outcomes including welfare spending (Brown and Hunter 1999;Lake and Baum 2001;Rudra and Haggard 2005;Huber, Mustillo, and Stephens 2008), education (Brown and Hunter 2000;Stasavage 2005), and public health (Besley and Kudamatsu 2006;Akkoyunlu-Wigley 2011a and2011b). Przeworski et al (2000) treat the subject more expansively, presenting evidence that once democracies and dictatorships reach a developmental threshold, different patterns of production, consumption, and investment lead to superior welfare outcomes in democracies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%