Does democracy help the poor and disadvantaged? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This paper reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve the welfare of the poor, and tests the hypothesis that democracy improves human development. Using infant mortality rates as a measure of human development, it conducts a series of time-series cross-national statistical tests of the relationship between democracy and infant mortality. It finds a strong relationship for both contemporary levels of democracy and a historical stock measure of democracy with infant mortality, though the results for the stock measure are more temporally robust and theoretically plausible. We find strong evidence of an empirical association between democratic stock and human development, and good reason to believe that this relationship is a causal one.
