Does Democracy Reduce Infant Mortality?

Many scholars claim that democracy reduces a country’s infant and child mortality rates, and by extension, improves the lives of the poor. I argue this is incorrect: even though democracies produce more public goods than nondemocracies, they have little or no effect on infant and child mortality rates. I show that previous studies linking democracy to reduced infant mortality failed to control for country-specific fixed effects and global health trends, and were marked by a selection bias that exaggerated the differences between democracies and nondemocracies. Once these shortcomings are corrected, democracy has little or no effect on infant and child mortality I speculate that this occurs because democracies provide public goods for middle and upper income groups but not the poor, a pattern that is consistent with a more nuanced interpretation of leading political economy models