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Government Partisanship and Human Well-Being

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Abstract

This paper shows that the partisan composition of government is strongly related to the well-being of citizens, measured by the reported level of life satisfaction and suicide rates in industrial countries. Our analysis, using survey data of 14 nations between 1980 and 2002, shows that the presence of left-leaning parties in government is associated with an increase the level of individual life satisfaction. The relationship holds true even after controlling for the effects of macroeconomic variables such as gross domestic product, unemployment rates and government welfare policies. Our panel data analysis of 21 nations between 1980 and 2004 also shows that suicide rates decrease when a country experiences a shift to more left-leaning government. The increased presence of right-wing parties in government has a negligible effect on suicide rates.

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Notes

  1. The data file is available at the ICPSR data archive (study no. 4357).

  2. In total, the Eurobarometer trend file includes 15 nations. Norway was excluded because its weight variable is not available.

  3. Substantive results do not change even if the country-specific time trend is removed from the model. Note that our model is equivalent to a random-intercept multilevel model. The presence of a group-level random component is taken into account by clustering standard errors by country-year.

  4. Our analysis excludes respondents who answered “don’t know” and other respondents who did not provide any answer to this question. These respondents constitute less than 1% of the sample.

  5. Our analysis excludes surveys in 1996 and 1997 because the question on life satisfaction was not included in these 2 years.

  6. See also the special issue on the “happiness” research in the Journal of Public Economics, volume 92, 2008.

  7. Some of the objections to the use of survey questions include their variability (e.g., responses may be susceptible to changes in the mood) and comparability (the reported well-being may not be comparable across people because people can adjust their responses based on their own implicit standards. See, for example, Loewenstein and Ubel (2008).

  8. The data are available on his web site. We accessed the web site on April 7, 2010.

  9. These social expenditures are spent on benefits with a social purpose, such as family assistance, support for children, cash benefits for low-income households, employment training, support for the elderly, and disability benefits.

  10. Di Tella et al. (2003) also included the number of children, but we omit this variable due to a large number of missing cases in many survey years.

  11. In ordered logistic regression, the marginal effects are not constant across different values of the explanatory variables. They depend on both the values of all explanatory variables and the sizes of estimates associated with the explanatory variables. We compute these predicted probabilities by using the estimates in column (2) and setting country-level variables and age at their mean and setting the indicator variables at 0.

  12. The data of government partisanship are unavailable for other OECD countries and non-OECD countries.

  13. We use the crude suicide rates for our analysis. The results are almost identical when we take a natural log of the suicide rates.

  14. The data are available at \(\langle\) http://www.who.int/whosis/mort/download/en/index.html \(\rangle\).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #305340, Denton, TX, 76203-5340, USA

    Tetsuya Matsubayashi

  2. Waseda University, 1-104 Totsuka-Cho Shinjyku, Tokyo, 169-8050, Japan

    Michiko Ueda

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  1. Tetsuya Matsubayashi
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  2. Michiko Ueda
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Correspondence to Tetsuya Matsubayashi.

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Matsubayashi, T., Ueda, M. Government Partisanship and Human Well-Being. Soc Indic Res 107, 127–148 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9831-8

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