Impact of Broad Inequalities on the Quality of Participatory Political Institutions: Evidence from cross-country panel data

This paper aims to examine the impact of measures of socioeconomic inequalities on the quality of participatory political institutions. The study uses the generalized method of moments as the main econometric method, analyzing a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2018. The results reveal that the infant mortality rate is negatively and significantly associated with the quality of participatory political institutions across multiple estimations, including robustness tests. The study's main contribution to the literature is the use of indicators of broad inequality, such as the infant mortality rate, to explain the quality of participatory political institutions, which has been neglected in previous research on the relationship between socioeconomic factors and the distribution of political power.