Department of Philosophy, Bilkent University, 06800, Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey; Department of Economics, Hacettepe University, 06800, Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey.
Soc Sci Med. 2017 Oct;190:237-246. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.08.023. Epub 2017 Aug 24.
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.
民主国家的儿童健康状况是否优于专制国家？我们认为，（1）民主政府有动机降低贫困家庭儿童的死亡率，（2）媒体自由增强了它们向最贫困人口提供降低死亡率资源的能力。我们使用 1961 年至 2011 年期间的 167 个国家的面板数据来检验这两个理论主张。我们发现，民主程度与 5 岁以下儿童死亡率呈负相关，而媒体自由的存在使这种负相关关系更为显著。这些结果在纳入国家和年份固定效应、随时间变化的控制变量以及对缺失值的多重插补后仍然稳健。
