Democracy and Deprivation: Does Media Freedom Make a Difference?

One potential flaw of democratic governments is that they may be no better than autocratic governments when it comes to improving the well-being of the poorest. That is because democratic leaders do not necessarily require the support of low-income voters in order to secure a winning a majority. In response to that challenge we argue that democratic leaders have a greater incentive and capability to reduce deprivation. Democratic governments have more of an incentive to seek the economic benefits associated with deprivation reduction. More importantly, democracies are better equipped to reduce deprivation because the greater protection they afford to media freedom enhances the quality of government decision-making. Freer media means that government officials are better informed about the need for intervention as well as the success, or failure, of its poverty-reducing policies. In the absence of the feedback provided by free media autocratic leaders cannot be sure that that they have selected the right policies or that low-level bureaucrats are properly implementing the government’s policies. This shortcoming of autocratic rule was explicitly acknowledged by Chairman Mao after the great famine of 1958-1961 and by Mikhail Gorbachev after he became the leader of a waning Soviet regime in the mid-1980s. In short, the quality of government decision-making is dependent on the quality of information received by (elected or unelected) decision-makers. In order to test that theoretical claim we use a panel of 167 countries for the years 1994-2011, measuring deprivation in terms of under-five mortality. We find robust evidence that the negative association between level of democracy and under-five mortality increases as the level of media freedom rises. That lends support to the claim that the greater communication openness typically produced by democratic states enhances the quality of the government’s decision-making and, thereby, its ability to tackle deprivation.