Does political orientation affect happiness? The case of South Korea

Yunmi Kim (), Sang-Wook Lee () and Tae-Hwan Kim ()
Additional contact information
Yunmi Kim: University of Seoul, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Sang-Wook Lee: Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Applied Econometrics, 2020, vol. 57, 102-118

Abstract: It is well known that in the US, conservatives are happier than liberals. The first empirical evidence for such a happiness gap between the two political groups was presented in 2006, and many subsequent studies have confirmed the finding consistently. In this study, we investigated whether a similar finding can be observed in the case of the Republic of Korea. We attempted to make a statistical estimation of the effect of political orientation on happiness using a dataset called ‘Seoul Survey’, which provides information on the happiness and political orientation of about 46000 citizens living in Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea. By controlling for all relevant socio-economic characteristics of each individual in the survey dataset, we found that political orientation has a significant effect on the level of subjective well-being or happiness. In contrast to the results observed in the US, our regression results indicated that liberals are significantly happier than conservatives. We also attempted to interpret the happiness gap in terms of monetary value.

Keywords: political orientation; conservative; liberal; happiness; subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://pe.cemi.rssi.ru/pe_2020_57_102-118.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:apltrx:0390

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Econometrics is currently edited by Anatoly Peresetsky

More articles in Applied Econometrics from Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anatoly Peresetsky ().