The Impact of Democracy on Well-being

Can governance impact directly on well-being? In this paper we examine subjective well-being using data for a cross section of countries from the World Values data set. We find that regional democratic satisfaction impacts on both individual happiness and life satisfaction. However, the impact is le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocial indicators research Vol. 115; no. 1; pp. 493 - 508
Main Authors Orviska, Marta, Caplanova, Anetta, Hudson, John
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer 01.01.2014
Springer Netherlands
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Correlation
Countries
Democracy
Developed Nations
Economics
Evidence
Females
Freedom
GDP
Gender
Governance
Gross Domestic Product
Happiness
Human Geography
Language Minorities
Life Satisfaction
Linear regression
Linguistics
Literature Reviews
Low income groups
Marital Status
Microeconomics
Norms
Per capita
Political sociology
Political systems, parties and institutions
Public Health
Quality of Life Research
Regional variation
Regions
Satisfaction
Slavic Languages
Social research
Social Sciences
Social Welfare
Socioeconomics
Sociology
State Policy
Studies
Unemployment
Values
Variables
Well Being
Wellbeing
Democracy
Happiness
Regions
Regional difference
Satisfaction
Governance
Psychological well-being
Social impact
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Summary:Can governance impact directly on well-being? In this paper we examine subjective well-being using data for a cross section of countries from the World Values data set. We find that regional democratic satisfaction impacts on both individual happiness and life satisfaction. However, the impact is less evident for women, rich people and for those in rich countries. The fact that the governance variable analysis is based on regional differences in democratic satisfaction reminds us that governance and indeed happiness often differs within countries as well as between them. The use of regional satisfaction in this manner helps overcome endogeneity problems which would be present if we were to use individual democratic satisfaction. Other significant determinants of happiness include settlement size, marital status, income, unemployment and being part of a linguistic minority/majority grouping.
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ISSN:0303-8300
1573-0921
DOI:10.1007/s11205-012-9997-8