Political regime and suicide: some relevant variables to be considered
Future work needs to include unemployment, alcohol consumption, and strikes to the analysis
The study by Page et al assesses the impact of type of political regime (conservative compared with social democratic) on suicide rates over time in Australia. There are comparatively few studies on the politics of suicide and this is apparently the first on Australia. It is careful to control for some of the possible confounding variables such as GDP growth and world wars, that might render the relation between political regime and suicide spurious. Australia is known to have relatively sound historical data on suicide. These are among the reasons that the study makes a path-breaking contribution for the field of the politics of suicide.
There are, however, some limitations of the investigation that are apparently not fully addressed by the authors. These are largely in two broad areas: model specification, and review …
