In Pursuit of Happiness - Subjective Well-Being Drives Political Support

We argue that individuals’ satisfaction with life affect their attitudinal system support. Our model posits that individuals keep a running tally of good and bad experiences in their every-day life, and this running tally affects attitudinal political support. Survey measures of life-satisfaction reflect the unobserved running-tally of personal experiences. We test support for this model in three types of data. First, we use data from WWS to demonstrate that life-satisfaction attitudes predict political support measures controlling for individual-level and country-level variables. Second, to test for causality in the relationship we use panel-data from the Swiss Household Panel. Drawing on the literature on the political consequences of life events, we trace the over-time development of supportive attitudes among panel participants who experience a break-up of a close personal relationship. We find that this experience undermines political support as measured by Satisfaction with Democracy. Third, we look into the consequences of having a failed vacation in the sun. The analysis is based on a three-wave panel survey with 500 non-randomly selected vacation travelers who were recruited at a Swedish airport before departing on a charter trip. We document a statistically significant and also substantial detrimental effect on support attitudes among panel participants who were unsatisfied with their vacation experience.