This interesting new research was conducted by Thomas J Bollyky, Tara Templin, Matthew Cohen, Diana Schoder, Joseph L Dieleman, and Simon Wigley and it came with the explanatory title, “The relationships between democratic experience, adult health, and cause-specific mortality in 170 countries between 1980 and 2016: an observational analysis”. From Science Daily:

A new study led by Stanford Medicine and the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that a better way to measure the role of democracy in public health is to examine the causes of adult mortality, such as noncommunicable diseases, HIV, cardiovascular disease and transportation injuries. Little international assistance targets these noncommunicable diseases.

When the researchers measured improvements in those particular areas of public health, the results proved dramatic. “The results of this study suggest that elections and the health of the people are increasingly inseparable,” the authors wrote.

A paper describing the findings will be published March 13 in The Lancet. Tara Templin, a graduate student in health research and policy at Stanford Health Policy, shares lead authorship with Thomas Bollyky, JD, director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Science Daily has written an overview of the study, found here, or you can view the entire research, as it was published in its entirety as open source on the well-known English medical journal The Lancet, an “independent, international weekly” founded way back in 1823. The study came with the following background to start it off:

Previous analyses of democracy and population health have focused on broad measures, such as life expectancy at birth and child and infant mortality, and have shown some contradictory results. We used a panel of data spanning 170 countries to assess the association between democracy and cause-specific mortality and explore the pathways connecting democratic rule to health gains.