Is It Culture or Democracy? The Impact of Democracy, Income, and Culture on Happiness

David Dorn (), Justina A. V. Fischer (), Gebhard Kirchgässner () and Alfonso Sousa-Poza ()

University of St. Gallen Department of Economics working paper series 2005 from Department of Economics, University of St. Gallen

Abstract: We look at the relation between democracy and perceived subjective well-being, taking also into account the impact of income and culture. After briefly reviewing the empirical results for Switzerland, we re-estimate this relationship allowing for the relative income position of individuals and also using a new more recent data from the Swiss Household Panel. No robust relationship between the extent of (direct) democracy and happiness can be observed. In a second step, we conduct a cross-national analysis, covering 28 countries with data from the 1998 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). There we observe a robust positive and significant relationship between democracy and happiness.

JEL-codes: I31 H10 D02 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-pbe and nep-soc
Date: 2005-06
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