Democracy and Gender: Explaining Subnational Disparities in Health in Argentina

• In Event: Poster Session: Women and Politics Research II; Sexuality and Politics; Health Politics and Policy & Representation and Electoral Systems
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Health Politics and Policy

Abstract

Does democracy reduce mortality in a country? If so, does the impact of political regimes on mortality differ within federal countries and what drives the difference? Despite a growing consensus on the positive impact of democracies on health outcomes, there are not conclusive arguments about why is it that more competitive regimes translate into healthier societies and if this effect is homogeneous within a territory. In order to better understand the relationship among these variables, this paper advances our understanding of the relation between democracy and social welfare by examining the effect of both national and subnational political regimes on infant mortality in Argentina. Specifically, it explores the question of whether variation in the type of political regime generates differences in the number of infant deaths over time. In doing so, this paper is innovative in two respects. First, by analyzing a federal country, it focuses on the differential impact of both national and subnational political regimes on infant mortality across subnational units. Second, it introduces a possible explanation for why democracies work differently within the same national unit: the role of women in subnational legislatures. The analysis shows that both improving the level of democracy and increasing the percentage of women in legislatures have a consistent negative effect on infant mortality and these results persist after controlling by a number of relevant covariates. As a possible explanation for this relation, the analysis also shows that regimes with higher percentages of women in legislatures reveal higher probabilities of sanctioning laws aimed at improving maternal and child health. The paper develops a time-series cross-sectional analysis and relies on an original data set covering over sixty years of Argentinian history (1945-2016).

Author

• Santiago Lujan Cunial, University of Pennsylvania