糖心TV

Michela Redoano (Economics Department)

Happy Voters

We investigate whether or not recent initiatives taken by governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of well be-ing to inform policies go in the same direction as citizens' expectations on what policy makers should do. In other words, do citizens reward policy makers for making them happier by voting for the incumbents?

Previous literature on retrospective voting has focused primarily on the effect of economic and financial outcomes on voting behaviour. We aim to contribute to this literature by augmenting standard models of voting behaviour with measures of well being.

Using the BHPS we find that citizens who are satisfied with their life are more likely to cast their vote in favour of the ruling party. Moreover, we find that partisan-citizens, i.e. the ones who exhibit strong ideological bias, are less likely to change their voting intention in response to variation in life satisfaction, compared with swing voter- i.e. the ones with no or little ideological bias.