Democracy and Health in Developing Countries: New Cross-National Evidence, 1990–2016

Abstract

Scholars have long investigated the factors that affect health outcomes in less-developed countries. One debate that has increasingly intensified in recent years is the democracy and health relationship in comparative international context. Scholars argue that democracy does affect country-level health outcomes in less-developed countries, while others argue democracy does not affect country-level health outcomes. I estimate the effect of numerous democracy indexes on child mortality and infant mortality in developing countries using fixed effects regression models with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors clustered by country. I find that multiple aspects of democracy exert significant beneficial effects on child mortality and infant mortality in less-developed countries.