Department of Biostatistics, Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA, USA; California Center for Population Research, UCLA, USA.
Department of Biostatistics, Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2020 Nov;265:113442. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113442. Epub 2020 Nov 7.
The effects of democracy on living conditions among the poor are disputed. Previous studies have addressed this question by estimating the average effect of democracy on early-life mortality across all countries. We revisit this debate using a research design that distinguishes between the aggregated effects of democracy across all countries and their individual effects within countries. Using Interrupted Time Series methodology and estimating model parameters in a Bayesian framework, we find the average effect of democracy on early-life mortality to be close to zero, but with considerable variation at the country-level. Democratization was followed by fewer child deaths in 21 countries, an increase in deaths in eight, and no measurable changes in the remaining 32 cases. Transitions were usually beneficial in Europe, neutral or beneficial in Africa and Asia, and neutral or harmful in Latin America. The distribution of country-level effects is not consistent with common arguments about the conditional effects of democratic transitions. Our results open a new line of research into the sources of theses heterogeneous effects.
民主对贫困人口生活条件的影响存在争议。之前的研究通过估计民主对所有国家的早期死亡率的平均影响来解决这个问题。我们使用一种研究设计重新探讨了这一争论，这种设计区分了民主在所有国家的聚合效应及其在各国的个体效应。使用中断时间序列方法，并在贝叶斯框架中估计模型参数，我们发现民主对早期死亡率的平均影响接近零，但在国家层面上存在相当大的差异。在 21 个国家，民主化之后儿童死亡人数减少，8 个国家的死亡人数增加，而其余 32 个国家则没有明显变化。转型在欧洲通常是有益的，在非洲和亚洲是中性或有益的，在拉丁美洲是中性或有害的。国家层面效应的分布与民主转型的条件效应的常见论点不一致。我们的研究结果为研究这些异质效应的来源开辟了一条新的研究途径。
