Do democratic regimes exhibit 'better' health outcomes?

This chapter examines the different mechanisms including institutional changes, policies, and environmental and cultural effects that democracies entail. While most evidence indicates a positive correlation between democracy and health, some studies that attempt to retrieve causal effects are more limited and exhibit differences depending on the form of variation examined and the measure of health outcome collected such as mortality and heights. More importantly, democracies seem to influence different forms of health inequalities, and effects differ by gender and socio-economic status, potentially giving rise to health inequality traps. Furthermore, democracies can exert a differential influence on elderly population, and on the mental and bound health of a society by affecting social environment and the culture individuals live on. The chapter concludes by assessing the effect of democracies in confronting communicable diseases such as Covid-19 and find that though autocracies are stricter in their mobility restrictions, they do not necessarily show better outcomes.