Do educated politicians facilitate better public health? Evidence from India
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 & MedicineVolume
366Publisher
Elsevier LtdVersion
- 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
2024-12-31Publication date
2025-01-01Copyright date
2025ISSN
0277-9536Publisher version
Language
- en