Abstract
The vote for the incumbent or the opposition has been explained for some decades by economic performance. It is proposed here that Subjective Well-being (SWB) is a better predictor of the vote for the incumbent or the opposition than economic performance. The evidence shows that the higher the SWB of the citizens of a country, the greater the chance that the official party will win the next presidential election, and that SWB data have a greater impact on the vote for the incumbent or the opposition than the GDP per capita growth rate. This study was conducted for Latin America.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Inglehart et al. (2008: 264) assure that “the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness.”
- 3.
Bok (2010, chapter 10) speaks at length on the different quality of government measurements that have been used and their relation with the evaluations that people make of government performance, comparing results from different countries.
- 4.
Most of the time, however, a justification of the inclusion of these variables in the models is not presented, and many times not even the interpretation of their results is included.
- 5.
The PDBA (http://pdba.georgetown.edu/) includes data on the presidential elections in all of the Latin American countries that represent the subcontinent sample in this work: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and Dominican Republic.
- 6.
Table 33.7 in the appendix indicates all of the episodes in the period and the character of the parties that won the elections in each episode.
- 7.
These results are shown in Table 33.8 in the appendix, together with the percentages that they represent.
- 8.
As regards Latin America, except for Haiti, the second round is instituted only for presidential elections, unlike other countries where it is also applied for parliamentary elections.
- 9.
http://www.latinobarometro.org. The Latinobarómetro has been making public opinion studies by carrying out surveys in 18 Latin American countries since 1995. The 1995–2010 period holds all of the data available at the time this research was done, which is why it is the period being studied.
- 10.
To enable interpretation, I reverted the scale in such a way as to keep it from being counterintuitive, that is, so that a greater degree of satisfaction would be represented by a larger number. The scale resulted as follows: … Would you say that you are (1) Not at all satisfied, (2) Not very satisfied, (3) Fairly satisfied, (4) Very satisfied.
- 11.
For example: Elections were held in Paraguay and Venezuela in 1998. The electoral results from Paraguay were studied based on the 1997 Latinobarómetro poll, because the Latinobarómetro for 1998 was conducted after (November) the elections (May). In turn, the electoral results for Venezuela were analyzed based on the information from 1998, since the Latinobarómetro poll was conducted before (November) the elections (December).
- 12.
Many of the Gini coefficients in the region are among the highest in the world.
- 13.
In cases when economic inequality is very low, a condition which most countries of the region are not under.
- 14.
Attending to the highest and lowest values in the annual average of life satisfaction during the entire period (1995–2009) for each country, we see that the greatest change was 0.55 and that it occurred in Ecuador, which presented a maximum value of 3.03 and a minimum of 2.48.
- 15.
This information may be consulted in Table 33.11 in the appendix, where the results of this regression are presented.
- 16.
In this sense, the significance of the life satisfaction coefficient is surprising, conclusive proof of the influence of subjective well-being on the resolution to vote for the incumbent or the opposition.
- 17.
These figures are excessive but very useful for illustration purposes; the analysis can evidently be made with smaller amounts.
- 18.
Let us remember that the measurement scale goes from 1 to 4, in such a way that 3 is the maximum change possible. This way, a 50 % change, that is, a change of 1.5 levels, in subjective well-being increases the chance for the incumbent to win by 185% (1.5 × 1.235 = 1.8525).
- 19.
PRI: Institutional Revolutionary Party
- 20.
PAN: National Action Party
- 21.
PRD: Democratic Revolution Party
- 22.
At first the idea was to simply consider the percentage of votes obtained by the incumbent party. However, this was discarded because when the number of parties in different electoral systems and the degree of “competitiveness” vary (some cases are practically bipartisan and in others there is a more or less strong competition between more than two parties), the proportion of votes obtained by the incumbent party varies substantially: when bipartisan, the proportion of votes by which one wins is greater (the votes are divided by only two parties) than when there are several parties. This lack of proportion does not completely measure the “magnitude” of the victories, which can be achieved by considering the difference in the percentage of votes obtained by the incumbent party and the strongest opposing party (the opposing party with the most votes). Therefore, the difference in percentage between one and another is the best indicator.
- 23.
A positive impact of increased life satisfaction on the margin of victory of the incumbent (that is, what is proposed and tested in this research) means that when the incumbent party wins, its victory is more pronounced. That is to say, its margin is wider: the difference in the percentage of obtained votes is greater. In turn, when it loses, it does so with a smaller margin. In other words, the race gets closer: the difference in the percentage of votes for the opposition will be less.
- 24.
The coefficient is practically four times greater than in the model without the country fixed effects.
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Martínez Bravo, I. (2016). The Usefulness of Subjective Well-Being to Predict Electoral Results in Latin America. In: Rojas, M. (eds) Handbook of Happiness Research in Latin America. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7203-7_33
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