The impact of democracy and media freedom on under-5 mortality, 1961-2011

- A theory linking child health and democracy via economic incentives is proposed.
- A theory linking child health and media freedom via information flows is proposed.
- Level of democracy is associated with decreases in under-5 mortality.
- Media freedom amplifies the reductive effect of democracy on under-5 mortality.

Do democracies produce better health outcomes for children than autocracies? We argue that (1) democratic governments have an incentive to reduce child mortality among low-income families and (2) that media freedom enhances their ability to deliver mortality-reducing resources to the poorest. A panel of 167 countries for the years 1961-2011 is used to test those two theoretical claims. We find that level of democracy is negatively associated with under-5 mortality, and that that negative association is greater in the presence of media freedom. These results are robust to the inclusion of country and year fixed effects, time-varying control variables, and the multiple imputation of missing values.