In Europe, the link between voter happiness and incumbent re-election is breaking down. Why?
a middle-aged man at a polling station in central London, when asked about his feelings on voting in a recent European election. “I’d be happy if I could kick all the bastards out.”
A recent study by George Ward of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed the political significance of happiness. He looked at what best explains the variation in the incumbents’ share of the vote in 15 European elections between 1973 and 2014. Life satisfaction, he found, was twice as important in explaining how incumbents did as the unemployment rate and about 30% more important thangrowth.
One possible answer is to say that support for both populism and happiness is going up because people are getting older. Old people might vote for more reactionary parties; they also tend to be happier. In Britain, according to YouGov, a polling organisation, 64% of voters over 65 voted to leave the, compared with only 29% of 18- to 24-year-olds. Measures of well-being leap up everywhere once you reach about 60.
Scraps of evidence support the idea that voters are indeed slaves to emotional whim, not people making rational judgments about which political party is most likely to contribute to their future happiness. Dr Liberini’s study discovered not only that happy people backed incumbents but that unhappy ones blamed governments for things that could not possibly be their fault. The death of a spouse, for example, reduced the likelihood of voting for an incumbent by 10%, compared with a control group.
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