Politics and population health: Testing the impact of electoral democracy

Patterson, Andrew C.; Veenstra, Gerry

doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2016.04.011

Cited by 30 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Our result is consistent with other studies which find that people living in democratic regimes have a longer life expectancy (Lin et al, 2012;Patterson and Veenstra, 2016). For example, Patterson and Veenstra (2016) show that electoral democracies have on average 11 years longer life expectancy and 62.5% lower infant mortality rates than autocracies Democratic regimes are more likely to spend more public money on health than autocratic ones. People also tend to have more access to health facilities, immunization and vaccinations in democratic regimes.…”

Section: Estimated Effects Of Institutional Quality On Health Outcomesupporting

confidence: 92%

Institutional Quality and Health Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Ouédraogo¹,

Dianda²,

Adeyele³

2020

RAE

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The objective of this research is to identify the institutional dimensions that are the most relevant to the improvement of health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. To this end, institutional quality measures are integrated into a health production model. This model is estimated by the Two-stage least squares method on a panel of 45 countries observed over the period 1996-2018. The data used are from the World Bank. The results show that the most relevant institutional dimensions that improve health outcomes in the region are by order: rule of law, control of corruption, government effectiveness, voice and accountability and political stability and absence of violence. For these reasons, African decision-makers who often have limited resources can focus on a few key components of these institutional qualities or their combinations to improve health outcomes in their countries.

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Section: Estimated Effects Of Institutional Quality On Health Outcomesupporting

confidence: 92%

Institutional Quality and Health Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Ouédraogo¹,

Dianda²,

Adeyele³

2020

RAE

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“…Oral health was associated not just with social policy indicators and income equality but also with measures of economic resources, such as per capita GDP. Such resources are key to improved population health at a national level (e.g., Patterson and Veenstra 2016) through better welfare, higher standard of living via better wages (Firebaugh and Beck 1994), or “trickling down” through intermediary factors such as education (Jenkins and Scanlan 2001). In addition, the national distribution of economic resources is important.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural Determinants and Children’s Oral Health: A Cross-National Study

et al. 2018

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Much research on children's oral health has focused on proximal determinants at the expense of distal (upstream) factors. Yet, such upstream factors-the so-called structural determinants of health-play a crucial role. Children's lives, and in turn their health, are shaped by politics, economic forces, and social and public policies. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between children's clinical (number of decayed, missing, and filled teeth) and self-reported oral health (oral health-related quality of life) and 4 key structural determinants (governance, macroeconomic policy, public policy, and social policy) as outlined in the World Health Organization's Commission for Social Determinants of Health framework. Secondary data analyses were carried out using subnational epidemiological samples of 8- to 15-y-olds in 11 countries ( N = 6,648): Australia (372), New Zealand (three samples; 352, 202, 429), Brunei (423), Cambodia (423), Hong Kong (542), Malaysia (439), Thailand (261, 506), United Kingdom (88, 374), Germany (1498), Mexico (335), and Brazil (404). The results indicated that the type of political regime, amount of governance (e.g., rule of law, accountability), gross domestic product per capita, employment ratio, income inequality, type of welfare regime, human development index, government expenditure on health, and out-of-pocket (private) health expenditure by citizens were all associated with children's oral health. The structural determinants accounted for between 5% and 21% of the variance in children's oral health quality-of-life scores. These findings bring attention to the upstream or structural determinants as an understudied area but one that could reap huge rewards for public health dentistry research and the oral health inequalities policy agenda.

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“…Thus, they have an incentive to provide welfare-promoting resources to a larger proportion of the population. In support of that theoretical claim there are a growing number of cross-national studies that find that that democracies produce healthier, more educated and better nourished populations than autocracies (see, for example, Besley and Kudamatsu, 2006;Blaydes and Kayser, 2011;Brown, 1999;Gerring et al, 2012;Mackenbach et al, 2013;Patterson and Veenstra, 2016;Wigley and Akkoyunlu, 2011). It is not immediately obvious, however, that democracies are better at promoting the well-being of the poorest members of society.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of democracy and media freedom on under-5 mortality, 1961–2011

Wigley

Akkoyunlu-Wigley

2017

Social Science & Medicine

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Do democracies produce better health outcomes for children than autocracies? We argue that (1) democratic governments have an incentive to reduce child mortality among low-income families and (2) that media freedom enhances their ability to deliver mortality-reducing resources to the poorest. A panel of 167 countries for the years 1961-2011 is used to test those two theoretical claims. We find that level of democracy is negatively associated with under-5 mortality, and that that negative association is greater in the presence of media freedom. These results are robust to the inclusion of country and year fixed effects, time-varying control variables, and the multiple imputation of missing values.

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Politics and population health: Testing the impact of electoral democracy

Cited by 30 publications

References 26 publications

Institutional Quality and Health Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Institutional Quality and Health Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Structural Determinants and Children’s Oral Health: A Cross-National Study

The impact of democracy and media freedom on under-5 mortality, 1961–2011

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