Democracies have better teeth than dictatorships, according to recent statistical correlation presented at the 96th General Session of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR) in London, held in conjunction with the IADR Pan European Regional (PER) Congress.
John Estrada-Montoya, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, gave a poster presentation titled "Does a Country's Political Regime Influence Its DMTF Index." Estrada-Montoya and co-author Jesús Erazo Estrada, also from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, sought to determine whether prolonged exposure to a given political regime affected the decay-missing-filled Index in various countries according to the political typologies of Social Democratic, Conservative, Liberal and Dictatorial regimes.
The results from the 62 countries showed that countries categorized as Social Democratic and Liberal had better results in decreasing the DMTF Index (Social Democratic with a decrease of -65.72% and Liberal with a decrease of -53.97%) than did Conservative (with a decrease of -37.62%) and especially Dictatorial regimes (with an increase of +14.53%).
Confounders: They used secondary data, made subjective assignments of political ideology, and used a simplistic graph; democracies and liberalism were left whereas dictatorships and conservativism were on the right. Obviously that is in defiance of the 20th century's greatest dictatorships, in Germany, the USSR, and China, which were left-wing regimes that suppressed free markets and religion; hardly a hallmark of conservatism. The British have bad teeth even though they have socialized health care. Such simplistic classifications are also not relevant in smaller nations, such as in the developing world.
This is probably a conservative, according to a poster. Except wealth is the biggest indicator of dental health.
A country's assignment to a political typology was determined by the political orientation of its ruling party, which is not valid. America has a Republican President and Congress but it is a liberal democracy, with greater civil rights and more equality than any country in the world.
The final confounder is that the data may not even be relevant. based on secondary sources from the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, the World Bank and various websites from countries that met the inclusion criteria. No primary sources were used.
