Replication Data for: Beyond the Tap: The Limited Value of Democracy for Delivering Universal Safe Water Access in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Despite a large volume of scholarly literature examining the relationship between democracy and public service provision, few studies have directly tested its impact on safe water access—a foundational component of human development. This paper investigates whether democratic governance confers advantages in expanding access not simply to “basic” water, but to water available on premises and free from fecal and priority chemical contamination in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2024. We theorize that especially in low information environments, citizens tend to focus more on the (under)provision of highly visible public services, and as a result, the power of democratic accountability will be relatively stronger for basic water. By contrast, citizens are less likely to know whether their water is safe to drink, and ensuring water safety frequently poses political challenges for governments. We conduct global sensitivity analyses of 39,000 cross-national regressions with multiple measures of democracy and water access. In the majority of our estimates, we find that democracy is positively associated with access to basic water, but weakly so, and not at conventional levels of statistical significance. By contrast, democracy is negatively associated with safe water access, and to the greatest extent in recent years. Our findings challenge the notion that democratic pressures will propel universal safe water access and suggest that more deliberately designed accountability mechanisms may be needed to achieve this goal.