European elections & support for governing parties over time: Anticipating being completely satisfied (as compared to completely dissatisfied) is associated with around a 6.5% higher probability of declaring support for such parties

Happiness and Voting: Evidence from Four Decades of Elections in Europe. George Ward. American Journal of Political Science, December 9 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12492

[An earlier working paper version of this article circulated under the title “Is Happiness a Predictor of Election Results?”]

Abstract: There is a growing interest among policy makers in the use of subjective well‐being (or “happiness”) data to measure societal progress, as well as to inform and evaluate public policy. Yet despite a sharp rise in the supply of well‐being‐based policy making, it remains unclear whether there is any electoral demand for it. In this article, I study a long‐run panel of general elections in Europe and find that well‐being is a strong predictor of election results. National measures of subjective well‐being are able to explain more of the variance in governing party vote share than standard macroeconomic indicators typically used in the economic voting literature. Consistent results are found at the individual level when considering subjective well‐being and voting intentions, both in cross‐sectional and panel analyses.


Discussion

Various countries around the world have recently begun to go “beyond GDP” by measuring subjective well-beingon a large scale and using the data (1) as a general measure of societal success and progress, (2) to guide and inform policy decisions, and (3) to evaluate the outcomes of government programs (Durand 2018; O’Donnell et al.2014). These practices are likely to continue to grow,in part because SWB is able to pick up the benefitsof a great deal of government activity that traditional economic outcomes may struggle to (Krueger and Stone2014).19 

Yet despite the recent sharp rise in the supply of SWB-based public policymaking, an open empiricalquestion is whether there is any electoral demand for it.The findings presented in this article suggest there maybe significant electoral incentives for politicians seeking reelection to consider SWB when deciding upon policypriorities.Global, cognitive evaluations of life are currently themost widely used measure of SWB by researchers inthe economic literature as well as by policy makers, but life satisfaction is only one component of SWB. Large-scale data on the emotional states of citizens are becoming more prevalent and are beginning to provide policymakers with a fuller picture of national SWB (Kahneman et al. 2004; Krueger and Stone 2014). Further research should investigate the extent to which measures of posi-tive and negative affect, as well as eudaemonic measures of purpose, are able to add to our understanding of vot-ing behavior.A further dimension of SWB is temporal: Although the main analysis of this article studies voters’ currentlevels of life satisfaction, it may be that future expectation sof life satisfaction are just as—or even more—important in driving vote choice. In a subset of waves of the German SOEP, respondents were asked about their anticipated life satisfaction in 5 years’ time, using the same 0–10 response scale as with current life satisfaction. In Table A1, I find that people’s future life satisfaction dominates current life satisfaction when it comes to predicting support for governing parties within people over time. Anticipating being completely satisfied (as compared to completely dissatisfied) is associated with around a 6.5% higher probability of declaring support for a governing party.20 

Open to further research is the broader questionof what array of determinants of SWB, and potentiallywhich domains of SWB, drive the link between nationalhappiness and election results—and ultimately what incumbents might do to improve their chances of reelec-tion. Although SWB has been shown to be determinedby a host of policy-relevant yet noneconomic variables,including physical and mental health, environmenta lquality, social cohesion, crime and corruption, quality of government services, and education (see, e.g., Clark et al.2018; Diener et al. 1999; Dolan, Peasgood, and White2008), the analysis of Liberini, Redoano, and Proto (2017)suggests voters may also reward/punish incumbent politicians for boosts and dips in their happiness that arecaused by factors outside of government control. Further research may continue to investigate (1) the extent to which voters are able (or willing) to filter which elementsof their well-being provide useful information about thequality and effort of incumbents, and (2) the theoretical implications of this for our understanding of democratic accountability.21 

Although SWB is a stronger predictor of incumbent vote share in general elections than economic growth, un-employment, or inflation, macroeconomic variables are nevertheless significant predictors of government elec-toral success conditional on national happiness. Equally,at the individual level, SWB and personal finances are in-dependently predictive of voting intentions. This suggests politicians face multiple incentives to improve people’s economic as well as broader non economic well-being.Future theoretical work may look to model these dynam-ics within a multitask political agency framework.22 

The data used here are observational, and it isworth reiterating that it is not possible to interpret thee mpirical associations presented in this article causally. 

Rather, the analysis is focused on determining what bestpredicts the electoral fate of governing parties. Despite this important caveat, however, a causal interpretation of the findings is suggested by Liberini, Redoano, and Proto(2017), who leverage exogenous variation in SWB to demonstrate a causal mechanism between happiness and self-reported incumbent voting intentions. The analysis presented here suggests that this effect is also evident atthe national level, across 15 countries over four decades, in real-world elections.