Presented by Natasha Borges Sugiyama, PhD
Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

How does democracy work to improve well-being? In this study, we disentangle the component parts of democratic practice—elections, civic participation, expansion of social provisioning, local administrative capacity—to identify their relationship with well-being. Drawing on an original dataset of subnational governance in Brazil from 2006 to 2013, we show that participatory institutions, social programs, and local state capacity can interact to buttress one another and reduce infant mortality rates