Are democratic governments good for public health? The impact of political regime on disease-specific mortality from 1962-2002

Brian Chin, University of Pennsylvania
Hiroaki Matsuura, Harvard University

The direction of democracy's direct impact on health is still under debate. In theory, democracy can improve health status by reflecting the voice of poor in national level politics. However, there may be a negative impact of democracy on health because the state does not enforce its strong power to limit individual rights for public health purposes under democracy. The regression analysis uses country level disease-specific mortality data as a proxy for health and a constructed panel data of several countries between 1962 and 2002. The independent variables include the dummy variable of political regime status during the same period from the POLITY IV database as well as socioeconomic variables. This study is distinct from previous studies since the focus is on how much democracy improves health status in countries that suffer from specific diseases and conditions rather than how much democracy improves health status for an average country.