About 2 billion people — just under a quarter of the world’s population — lack regular access to clean drinking water. And roughly 800,000 people annually die from illnesses associated with unsanitary water.
Drinking water access is a fundamental problem for human and economic development. The U.N., for instance, highlighted the issue in its Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, an ambitious 17-point agenda that specified safe drinking water as a basic global aim.
Past research shows that democracies, in comparison to other forms of government, tend to be more successful at delivering this kind of public good, which benefits a large portion of the population. This is likely due to accountability measures that include elections, greater transparency, and more freedom in civil society.
But now a study led by an MIT professor shows that across nearly 100 countries with developing economies, that dynamic has become more complex in the 21st century. While democracies are slightly ahead of non-democracies when it comes to providing at least some water, they have been falling behind when it comes to ensuring that there is safe water on tap.
“Among low- and middle-income countries, which have not done as well economically, we found there wasn’t really a big difference between democracies and non-democracies in the provision of what is called basic drinking water,” says MIT political scientist Evan Lieberman, co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “But for safe drinking water, we found, surprisingly, that democratic countries were becoming less good at extending access.”
While the study does not pinpoint the precise reasons for this, it suggests a lens for viewing the problem. Democracies tend to be better at delivering visible public goods, the kinds of things citizens can literally see — like infrastructure that delivers water. But the difference between safe and unsafe water is not necessarily visible and obvious, so public officials may not be as responsive.
“This is likely a big part of the equation, that the invisibility of safe water makes it a less compelling public good for politicians,” says Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa, and director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.
The paper, “Beyond the tap: The limited value of democracy for delivering universal safe water access in low- and middle-income countries,” is published in the journal World Development. The authors are Lieberman, and Naomi Tilles, a doctoral student in political science at Stanford University.
Seeing is believing
To conduct the study, the scholars analyzed drinking water data recorded by the World Health Organization/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. That provides information for basic availability to water, defined as access to an improved water source with no more than 30 minutes of collection time; and access to safe drinking water, defined as an improved water source that is available on premises, available when needed, and free from potentially disease-producing contaminants, which range from fecal matter to harmful chemicals.
Examining 96 low- and middle-income countries, the researchers looked at a variety of measures pertaining to its democratic or non-democratic features, and ran 39,000 regressions to see how the form of government related to its provision of water. Overall, Lieberman and Tilles found that democratic governance is modestly associated with an increase in the basic availability of water, compared to non-democracies. However, the effect is not particularly robust.
The good news is that between 2000 and 2024, 81 of the 90 countries with data available in both years made gains in safe drinking water access. However, democratic countries have been less successful than their non-democratic counterparts in advancing the goal of achieving universal access.
“Moreover, the gap between democracies and non-democracies seems to be getting a little bit larger over time,” Lieberman observes.
Because the study is focused on establishing the overall empirical situation, the scholars do not claim to have determined why this trend has been emerging. Many newer democracies have struggled to establish high-functioning governance in some regions, which may influence their overall results.
More broadly, Lieberman suggests, visibility matters. Past scholarship has shown that democracies perform relatively well in delivering visible public goods, especially in countries with little information in the public sphere. Delivering water generates attention for politicians in a way that keeping water safe does not.
“Politicians may figure out they should do things citizens like, to stay in office, such as bringing water to an area,” Lieberman says. “You can have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and people feel it really happened. But water quality is often invisible.
It’s a more difficult challenge to ensure safe water: You have to do testing, prevent people from polluting, and you may need to treat the water.”
In any case, Lieberman notes, “Given what we find, what is clear is that the incentives are not aligned under the current systems for advancing safe-water access within all democracies. That provides opportunities for human agency to create incentives for citizens, nongovernment agencies, and governments to do what is needed.”
Development for all
Lieberman comes to the topic of water access as an expert on African politics. His most recent book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty” (Princeton University Press, 2022), examines the vicissitudes of South African democracy. In the book and in general, he suggests that democracy is the most viable path toward development with “dignity,” meaning economic growth accompanied by liberties and equal treatment under the law.
“I think democracy provides dignified development, by granting people recognition and participation, and that’s an extremely valuable thing,” Lieberman says.
Still, when it comes to the performance of many countries with regard to safe water, he says, “I think we just need to be clear-eyed about real problems.”
In some countries, he suggests, the time horizon of elected officials may also be relatively short-term, and they may be more oriented toward simpler problems than water safety. At the same time, other members of society need to find ways to make water safety a bigger issue in the eyes of the public.
“There are important lessons for democracies to learn, and citizens in civil society who are aware of this challenge need to figure out ways to get people to care about it, to recognize the connection between illness and unsafe water, and to use political campaigns to advance their longer-term interests,” Lieberman says.
Overall, he adds, “There is something intrinsically important about democratic government. Then the question becomes how to make it work better to deliver really important outcomes like safe water.”
