Health and Democracy.

In spite of the inexorable march of democracy around the globe, just how democratic institutions a¤ect human well-being is open to debate. The evidence that democracy promotes prosperity is neither strong nor robust. Moreover which aspects of policy making and human well-being are promoted by democracies is still a subject of debate.1 Even if correlations between democracy and outcome measures can be found, there is an overriding di¢ culty of interpreting them as causal e¤ects. Whether democracy matters per se or simply serves as a proxy for societal and political development presents a di¢ cult problem for research in this area. Thinkers such as Lipset (1959) have argued that democracy can thrive only when conditions are right. If this is correct, then becoming democratic may only serve as a proxy for these hard-to-measure cultural and societal preconditions. This paper explores these issues further by reconsidering the link between democracy and health using panel data from a cross-section of countries. The