Political Orientation and Happiness

The price of being a liberal is a less happy life.  Before you fire back, let me hasten to say I do not share this idea.  It’s the argument made in an Opinion piece in the New York Times (Nov. 25, 2021) by Brad Wilcox, Hal Boyd and Wendy Wang.  It is not a new idea.  Claims that conservatives feel happier than liberals have been around for quite some time.

But what grabbed my attention in this Opinion piece was its title “How Liberals Can Be Happier.”  I thought I would read about the beneficial effects of goodness, kindness, and other virtuous practices on a person’s experience of happiness.  But it was not about virtue seeking.  The sources of happiness identified by the three authors (as well as others) are all related to a person’s experience of a more communal life usually related to family, religious attendance or community engagement.  Presumably, conservatives have a richer social life and this contributes to the happiness gap between them and liberals.  So, all liberals have to do is get up, go out there and mingle.

This recipe of how we attain happiness left me unsatisfied on several grounds.  So, I decided to pursue the issue a bit further.  I decided to pursue three questions.  What do we know from other studies on happiness and political orientation?  How do places with more conservatives or more liberals do with respect to the above ingredients of happiness?  And thirdly, what can we learn from the international evidence on country rankings in happiness?

A critical question is “do people really act as being happy as opposed to thinking they are happy?”  That is, “are the responses of surveyed people reliable proxies of happiness?”  On this issue, a study found that conservatives are more likely to perceive themselves as happy whereas liberals act as if they are indeed happy.  Another related question is “how is happiness measured?”  Results differ if happiness is defined differently from survey to survey.

Another study, utilizing an international sample, including Americans, found that the level of happiness conservatives and liberals feel depends on whether their respective political ideology prevailed in their socio-cultural environment at the time they were surveyed.  Therefore, the happiness gap is more dependent on environmental conditions than on personal life-style choices. 

If indeed social engagement matters for happiness, how do the socialization opportunities vary across conservatives and liberals?  One study argues that the happiness gap in favor of conservatives is explained in part by the fact that more conservatives than liberals enjoy a socio-economic status that privileges them to membership to more groups relative to liberals.  Another interesting finding is that religiosity adds more to the happiness of conservatives than to the happiness of liberals.  From this I surmise that faith and the experience of religious attendance leaves liberals less satisfied if they collide with their personal political and moral views.  Examples are the gap between personal and religious views on issues related to sexual/gender orientation and abortion.

Some studies have also proposed psychological explanations of why conservatives tend to feel happier.  According to researchers, conservatives are more inclined to rationalize, and thus accept, economic and social inequities as matters of how the world is.  As such inequities widen, so does the happiness gap since the liberals’ discomfort with inequity rises.   As I have written in an earlier blogpost, we also have biological evidence that post-emotional critical mental processing of political and ethical issues is associated more with liberals than conservatives.  An examined life may  not necessarily be a happy one.

If the institutions of family and community engagement matter for happiness, we would expect to see more of that in mostly conservative states.  Actually, we don’t.  The top ten states in rates of divorced women are all, except one, states with high concentrations of conservative Americans.  The same is true for out-of-wedlock births.  Also suicides and opioid abuse is higher in rural states with a predominance of conservative residents.  Civic engagement (a proxy of community involvement) is also low in Southern States and without significant differences between blue and red states outside the South.  Interestingly, many of the same states that score relatively low in family stability and traditional norms, social ills, and civic engagement happen to be those with higher degree of religiosity.  This tells me that a conservative ideology does not necessarily come with the social and economic conditions that enable people to lead happy lives.

Finally, the third question I wanted to answer is what we can learn from country rankings by happiness.  The World Happiness Report has been issued for several years and it ranks countries by how high their residents score in subjective well-being factors like how they evaluate their life and whether they had recently experienced positive or negative feelings. 

The 2021 report shows that nine of the top ten countries with the happiest people are in Western European liberal democracies with Finland, Denmark and Switzerland ranked first, second and third.  The US ranks number 19.  Western European democracies are overall as socially liberal as the US and also have similar degrees of civic engagement as the US.  They do differ though from the US in two important factors.  They have much lower religious attendance and they provide their citizens with more comprehensive safety nets than the US does for its own people.  They also have better indicators of well-being when it comes to suicide and opioid abuse rates as well as mortality and health.

The 2021 Report also found that the greater the trust people feel toward society and institutions the more positive the evaluation of their lives.  We know that the last two years Americans did not score well in either type of trust.

It is still possible that within a country happiness may vary by the political orientation of its people.  But what we learn from state-by-state comparisons and international rankings the ingredients may not exactly be those claimed in different studies.  Instead of asking, on the basis of dubious evidence, liberals to adopt the life styles of their conservative fellow citizens in order to feel happier, it is more constructive to create the social and economic conditions that enable all, conservatives and liberals, to live happier lives.