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.