The Impact of Electoral Competition on Medical Utilization among Taiwanese People：A Case Study on The 2012 Presidential and Legislative Election
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Chiu, Mao-Kai
Abstract
Owing to the economic growth, more and more developed countries are now having their political systems toward democracies. In a democratic political system, electoral campaign has been a policy tool. Taiwan is not one of the exceptions and there are a number of different scale elections held. It has been documented that voters may become depressed, anxious and stomach upset etc after the election period. To date, most empirical studies that examine the relationship between human health and political economy focus on political competition and cross-country difference in health. Not much evidence has been provided on the relationship between political competition and medical utilization of voters. The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which electoral competition may affect medical utilization of voters using a case study in Taiwan.
Using a unique dataset which compiling the National Health Insurance Profile and the Presidential and Legislative Election Data in 2011 and 2012, we estimate a Difference-in-Differences model to investigate how the medical utilization of voters may change over the election period. Several interesting findings can be summaries. Firstly, estimation results indicate that the campaign effect significantly reduces voters'' outpatient visits and election effect remarkably increases outpatient visits of voters. On the other hand, after controlling the electoral competition variable, the utilization of outpatient services increases even more significantly with the higher electoral competition. Secondly, the election effect still raises the utilization of outpatient services in both circumstances of all departments or separate department without controlling the electoral competitive variable in different electoral intervals. However, the campaign effect is positively-related to the number of outpatient visits a week before election period, which suggests that there is a significant increase on the utilization of outpatient services a week prior to election. In addition, results also show that the use of outpatient services of voters is highly positively related to the electoral competition. Overall, electoral competition does raise the utilization of medical resources.
Subjects
選舉競爭
醫療使用
Difference-in-Differences
SDGs
Type
thesis
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