Happy Voters

Federica Liberini, Michela Redoano and Eugenio Proto
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Michela Redoano: University of Warwick

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: In this paper we investigate whether or not recent initiatives taken by governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of Subjective WellBeing (SWB) to inform policy makers go in the same direction as citizens expectations on what policy makers should do. We test retrospective voting hypotheses by using standard measures of SWB as a proxy for utility instead of the commonly used indicators of economic and …nancial circumstances. Using the British Household Panel Survey Data we …nd that citizens who are satis…ed with their life are more likely to cast their vote in favour of the ruling party, even taking into account ideological preferences. We show that SWB in‡uences voting decision even when the event a¤ecting the SWB is beyond the government’s control, like the spouse death.

Keywords: Wellbeing; Political Competition; Swing Voter Hypothesis; Retrospective Voting. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

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http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/resear ... 169-2013_redoano.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Happy voters (2017)
Working Paper: Happy Voters (2014)
Working Paper: Happy Voters (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:169

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