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Do educated politicians facilitate better public health? Evidence from India

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posted on 2025-05-08, 07:42 authored by Deepthi Sara Anil, Soham SahooSoham Sahoo, Debayan Pakrashi

Political representatives and their directives are discredited when there is an instance of rising mortality. However, there is limited empirical evidence linking public health outcomes to the quality of politicians. We investigate whether electing political leaders with higher levels of formal education affects child survival. Using an instrumental variable strategy exploiting quasi-experimental outcomes of close elections, we find that college?graduate politicians lead to better child health outcomes, i.e., a reduction in neonatal, infant, and under-five mortality in the regions they are elected from. We explore the potential channels of graduate leaders’ impact, drawing from early life and health infrastructure investments. We also find heterogeneous impacts of graduate leaders on child mortality across states with varying levels of institutional quality and based on the leaders’ political affiliation.

Funding

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore through a Research Seed Grant

History

School

  • Loughborough Business School

Published in

Social Science & Medicine

Volume

366

Publisher

Elsevier Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Acceptance date

2024-12-31

Publication date

2025-01-01

Copyright date

2025

ISSN

0277-9536

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Soham Sahoo. Deposit date: 1 January 2025

Article number

117671

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