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Does Society Matter? Life Satisfaction in the Enlarged Europe

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Abstract

Life satisfaction is quite heterogeneously distributed across countries of the enlarged European Union. Previous research has shown how living conditions within individual countries, such as access to material and emotional resources, are important for personal well-being, but it has been less successful in explaining differences between countries. This article investigates whether it matters in which political and economic circumstances people live, as well as whether their particular perception of the quality of their societal environment plays a role. People are well aware that the institutional and cultural settings in which their lives are embedded create opportunities and limitations: within individual countries, perceptions of society influence life satisfaction outcomes irrespective of access to resources. However, their importance for well-being differs across Europe: perceptions of societies are highly decisive in countries that provide only a minimum of social security and in which the reliability of political institutions is poor. In rich and stable countries, the impact is weaker and private social support becomes more important. In addition to these country-specific weights of life satisfaction determinants, life satisfaction variations between countries can be explained to a large extent by taking into consideration the economic performance, the social security level, and the political culture in a country—all in all, general conditions that enable people to live a respectable life.

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Notes

  1. For further information on data quality, see Arendt (2003), Nauenburg and Mertel (2004), Kohler (2007). For an overview of research results, see Alber et al. (2004), Alber et al. (2007).

  2. Country groups are formed on the basis of familiar welfare state typologies and their adjustments (Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999; Leibfried 1992; Siaroff 1994; Ferrera 1996; Bonoli 1997).

  3. See also other studies on life satisfaction which rely on different data sources like the Eurobarometer, the European Value Survey or the European Social Survey (Gundelach and Kreiner 2004; Delhey 2004; Neller 2004).

  4. Unstandardized coefficients are displayed in the following scatterplots.

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  1. Research Unit: Inequality and Social Integration, Social Science Research Center Berlin, Reichpietschufer 50, Berlin, 10785, Germany

    Petra Böhnke

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  1. Petra Böhnke
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Böhnke, P. Does Society Matter? Life Satisfaction in the Enlarged Europe. Soc Indic Res 87, 189–210 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-007-9169-4

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