Does Democracy Make You Taller?

CESifo Fellow Joan Costa-i-Font and his colleague Alberto Batinti did their bit to set the record straight in their latest CESifo Working Paper, by examining one firmly established retrospective marker for human health and welfare during childhood: changes in the average height achieved at around 20 years old. As a wealth of studies point out, the gap between the genetically predetermined and the actual height is influenced in great part by a wide set of psychosocial and environmental stressors occurring in early childhood and adolescence.

Previous research has already shown that democracy can help to reduce environmental stressors by providing wider access to healthcare, more effective dissemination of health-related information, improved nutrition, and lower pollution, leading overall to a higher standard of living. Democracy also correlates with lower child mortality and longer life expectancy.

However, child mortality is not informative about the changes in quality of life upon survival at a given age. In contrast, according to the authors, measures of human stature are sensitive to post-childhood survival variability.

To find out how changes in average height play out under exposure to democracy and changes in democratic quality, the researchers examined individual data from several European countries that underwent varying political-regime transitions in different years within the 1959-1999 period, including a rich set of regional data spanning several decades.

After subjecting their results to a wide variety of robustness checks, they found that democracy exerts a large effect on average male height, of up to 2 cm, with one standard deviation change in a democracy index increasing heights by 0.78 cm. This effect is more pronounced on early cohorts, meaning those born closer to the time of change towards democracy, though it does not disappear in those born in the two subsequent decades.

Intriguingly, democracy does not seem to have the same effect on women, suggesting that, oddly enough, democracies might end up increasing gender-height dimorphism. But why should that be?

As it turns out, it all seems to be due to women being more resilient in the face of stressors—and even resilient to institutional and political changes. Thus, while males benefit from the removal of negative stressors that would make it difficult for them to close the gap between their actual and their potential height, females do not experience a similar gain since achieving their potential height had not been hindered by the prevalent negative stressors to start with. In other words, while gender dimorphism increases, it does so at no height costs to women.

Bottom line? Democracy makes you taller. If you are a man, that is.

(By the by, Americans have been getting relatively shorter for quite a while now. Just saying.)