Happiness and the state: Going beyond GDP with political performance measures for societal subjective well-being

Abstract

Extending human development metrics beyond GDP, we explore the impact of objective national political performance measures of state capacity, extraction and allocations as additional mechanisms impacting societal happiness. While ‘adding politics back in’ is not novel, such objective political performance measures are distinctly apolitical and not ideologically anchored to types of political systems, cultural legacies or institutional structures. Compared to subjective governance perceptions, these measures potentially allow for alternative, more accurate comparisons of state performance across time, space, structures and cultures. Here we econometrically investigate the role of national political performance on subjective well-being from the World Happiness Report 2021 for a panel of 83 countries from 2006 to 2019. We perform exploratory data analysis and then offer fixed effects, panel-corrected standard error estimations controlling for vectors of more traditional economic, social, and technology determinants to investigate how such factors change in various regional and heterogeneous cultural contexts. Globally, our findings indicate that political performance is almost equally as important as economic development, being strongly associated with increasing societal level subjective well-being. In going beyond GDP to assess human attainment, understanding nuanced national political performance is critical when seen through the evidentiary lens of various regional and cultural contexts.

Keywords

• Happiness
• Subjective well-being
• Economic development
• Growth
• Political performance
• Political capacity