Hoops Katherine, Cohen Phillip, Goeddel Lee, Fredrickson Caroline
Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, https://ror.org/00za53h95Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States.
https://ror.org/05vzafd60Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, United States.
J Law Med Ethics. 2025 May 26;53(2):1-7. doi: 10.1017/jme.2025.10113.
The influence of democracy and democratization on health is difficult to disentangle from a complex web of factors such as population characteristics and social determinants of health. The goal of this study was to begin to characterize the roles of the individual attributes of democracy on a key measure of health, mortality rates among female children under five years of age.
We conducted a retrospective observational cohort study utilizing data over a study period from 1975-2021 with data from 173 countries. We utilized publicly available data from the Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoD) and the United Nations Inter Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN-IGME) databases.
Our data support prior work showing that strength of democracy is associated with improved population health measures. Stronger democracies are associated with improvements in female child mortality, even controlling for within-country variation over time and for income level. This relationship is most pronounced when examining the relationship between protections of civil rights and child mortality.
Child mortality increases when democracy declines. With declines in democracy worldwide, it is critical that advocates are concerned with the global democratic experience, especially with policies that compromise fundamental rights.
民主和民主化对健康的影响难以从诸如人口特征和健康的社会决定因素等复杂因素网络中厘清。本研究的目的是开始描述民主的个体属性对一项关键健康指标——五岁以下女童死亡率的作用。
我们进行了一项回顾性观察队列研究，利用了1975年至2021年研究期间来自173个国家的数据。我们使用了全球民主指数（GSoD）和联合国儿童死亡率估计机构间小组（UN-IGME）数据库中的公开数据。
我们的数据支持先前的研究结果，即民主的力量与改善人口健康指标相关。更强的民主制度与女童死亡率的改善相关，即使在控制了国家内部随时间的变化和收入水平之后也是如此。在研究民权保护与儿童死亡率之间的关系时，这种关系最为明显。
民主衰退时儿童死亡率会上升。鉴于全球民主的衰退，倡导者关注全球民主状况，尤其是关注那些损害基本权利的政策至关重要。
