Democracy and suicide

Direct democracy is good for us. This paper presented to the Royal Economic Society annual conference yesterday by Justina Fischer says:

This paper examines the effects of political institutions and government structure on suicide using a balanced panel for 26 Swiss states over the period 1980–1998. For the whole population, our results indicate that stronger popular rights and more fiscal decentralization reduce suicide.

This corroborates this paper, which shows that it's not just the outcomes of political decisions that affect well-being, but also "procedural utility" - how the decisions are reached. Direct democracy makes people happier.
However, that paper used only subjective, reported well-being, which some believe to be unreliable, whereas Fischer used objective data.
There are, however, a couple of caveats. Fischer found that men benefit more than women from empowerment, and that, curiously, greater powers for local government were associated with more suicides.

Comments

[dearieme]

"reduce", indeed: arguing from correlation to cause. I am always a little unhappy to see weak arguments advanced to support something I approve of, such as use of referendums. (I take it that that's the key feature of "direct democracy"?)

[Justina Fischer]

Yes, you are right, direct democracy implies mainly the people voting on costly spending projects (fiscal referendum) or initiating new laws (e.g. laws on public education)

Causality can sometimes be strengthened by using explanatory factors measured in the past, prior to the observed suicide decision