Health and Democracy

Abstract

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. 1 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.

Political institutions and government spending behavior: theory and evidence from Iran

“…They show that democracies devote a higher percentage of their educational resources to primary education, the level that benefits the largest segment of the electorate and that is most critical for human capital formation in developing countries. Finally, Besley and Kudamatsu (2006) explore the association between political institutions and health spending in a cross country analysis.…”

Health in an unequal world: social circumstances, biology and disease

“…Interestingly, democracy, which should allow more of us some semblance of control, appears to be good for health even after taking other social conditions into account. 111 An important caution applies to the concept of freedom. In the sense used by Sen, and here, it does not imply privileging the rights of some individuals at the expense of the well-being of others.…”

When Does Aid Conditionality Work?

“…Studies on education also show that democracies spend more on education in Latin America (Brown and Hunter 2004;Huber et al 2008), Africa (Stasavage 2005), and around the world (Ansell 2008). Other studies show that democracies spend more on social welfare (Huber et al 2008;Rudra and Haggard 2005) and that democracies exhibit better health and education outcomes (Besley and Kudamatsu 2006;Nooruddin and Simmons 2006;Rudra and Haggard 2005). Nooruddin and Simmons's argument is thus not only consistent with the selectorate model but is also based on strong empirical foundations.…”