How's Your Government? International Evidence Linking Good Government and Well-Being

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 595-619

  Helliwell, John F ^a   Huang, Haifang ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69849131146     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123408000306     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. See R. J. Barro, ‘Economic Growth in a Cross-Section of Countries’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106 (1991), 406-43.
2. See D. Kahneman and J. Riis, ‘Living and Thinking About It: Two Perspectives on Life’, in F. A. Huppert, B. Keverne and N. Baylis, eds, The Science of Well-Being (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 285-304.
3. The individual-level results are reported in J. F. Helliwell and H. Huang ‘How's the Job? Well-Being and Social Capital in the Workplace’, NBER Working Paper, No. 11759 (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005), Table 3.
4. The national level results including personality effects are reported in J. F. Helliwell, ‘Well-Being, Social Capital and Public Policy: What's New?’ Economic Journal, 116 (2006), C34-C45, p. C40. The national level personality data are based on measures described in H. J. Eysenck and S. B. G. Eysenck, Manual of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (London: Hodder&Stoughton, 1975) and collected into an internationally comparable dataset in P. Steels and D. S. Ones, ‘Personality and Happiness:ANational Level Analysis’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83 (2002), 767-81.
5. National averages for suicide rates and measures of life satisfaction are used as alternative dependent variables for the same underlying equation in J. F. Helliwell, ‘Well-Being and Social Capital: Does Suicide Pose a Puzzle?’ Social Indicators Research (2007). The latest results of the comparative modelling of suicide and well-being, expanded to include life expectancy measures from the World Health Organization, are shown in Table 3.
6. Alarge prospective Finnish study showed suicide rates to be many times higher for those reporting low levels of life satisfaction. See H. Koivumaa-Honkanen, R. Honkanen, H. Viinamäki, K. Heikkilä, J. Kaprio and M. Koskenvuo, ‘Life Satisfaction and Suicide: A 20-year Follow-up Study’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 158 (2001), 433-9.
7. D. Kaufmann, A. Kraay and M. Mastruzzi, ‘Governance Matters IV: Governance Indicators for 1996-2004’ (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2005).
8. See J. F. Helliwell ‘How's Life? Combining Individual and National Variables to Explain Subjective Well-Being’, Economic Modelling, 20 (2003), 331-60.
9. Helliwell, ‘How's Life?’.
10. See S. M. Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review, 53 (1959), 69-105.
11. See J. F. Helliwell, ‘Empirical Linkages Between Democracy and Economic Growth’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 225-48.
12. Helliwell and Huang, ‘How's the Job?’
13. For tables showing these effects, please see the author's website as shown in fn. 13.
14. R. A. Easterlin, ‘Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence’, in P. A. David and M. W. Reder, eds, Nations and Households in Economic Growth (New York: Academic Press, 1974), pp. 89-125. An important recent example, with good references to earlier work, is E. Luttmer, ‘Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120 (2005), 963-1002.
15. Helliwell and Huang, ‘How's the Job?’, Table 1.
16. See J. F. Helliwell and R. D. Putnam, ‘The Social Context of Well-Being’, in Huppert, Keverne and Bayliss, eds, The Science of Well-Being, pp. 435-59.
17. J. D. Sachs and A. Warner, ‘Economic Reform and the Process of Economic Integration’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (1995), 1-118.
18. J. D. Sachs, ‘Institutions Don't Rule: Direct Effects of Geography on Per Capita Income’, NBER Working Paper, No. 9490 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2003).
19. See D. Rodrik, A. Subramanian, and F. Trebbi, ‘Institutions Rule: The Primacy of Institutions over Geography and Economic Integration’, NBER Working Paper, No. 9305 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research 2003); D. Acemoglu, S. Johnson and J. Robinson, ‘Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Term Growth’, NBER Working Paper, No. 10481 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005), and Sachs, ‘Institutions Don't Rule’.
20. As emphasized by C. King, C. J. R. Murray, J. A. Salomon and A. Tandon, ‘Enhancing the Validity and Cross-Cultural Comparability of Measurement in Survey Research’, American Political Science Review, 97 (2003), 567-83.
21. See Kahneman and Riis, ‘Living and Thinking About It’.
22. There is a parallel here with the distinction between ‘strongly-institutionalized polities’ and ‘weakly institutionalized polities’ emphasized by D. Acemoglu, ‘Constitutions, Politics and Economics: A Review Essay on Persson and Tabellini's “The Economic Effect of Constitutions” ‘ NBER Working Paper, No. 11235 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005). Our results suggest that the value attached to specific types of institution vary systematically, and plausibly, between these two types of society.
23. See D. Kaufmann, J. Montiorol-Garriga and F. Recanatini, ‘How Does Bribery Affect Public Service Delivery? Micro Evidence from Service Users and Public Officials in Peru’ (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2005).
24. See T. Persson and G. Tabellini, The Economic Effect of Constitutions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003); T. Persson and G. Tabellini, ‘Constitutional Rules and Fiscal Policy Outcomes’, American Economic Review, 94 (2004), 25-45; T. Persson, ‘The Consequences of Constitutions’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 2 (2004), 139-61.
25. ‘Models of alternative electoral rules predict proportional elections to produce policies better serving the interests of broad majorities than do majoritarian elections, either directly through incentives of politicians, or indirectly via party formation and the incidence of coalition government’, from T. Persson, ‘Forms of Democracy, Policy and Economic Development’, NBER Working Paper, No. 11171 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005), pp. 23-4.
26. See B. Frey and A. Stutzer, ‘Happiness, Economy, and Institutions’, Economic Journal, 110 (2000), 98-138.
27. As suggested by Acemoglu, ‘Constitutions, Politics and Economics’.
28. From Persson and Tabellini, The Economic Effect of Constitutions.
29. As argued by Acemoglu, ‘Constitutions, Politics and Economics’.
30. C. Bjørnskov, A. Dreher and J. A. V. Fischer, ‘The Bigger the Better? Evidence of the Effect of Government Size on Life Satisfaction around the World’, Public Choice, 127 (2006), 267-92. The authors have discovered another important interaction in the relation between good government and well-being. They find (and we have confirmed in our samples) an interaction between the quality of government (government efficiency) and the size of government consumption spending, re-enforcing a generally observable negative effect where the quality of government is low, while reducing and eventually reversing it where the quality of government is high. This is as theory would suggest, with government consumption (which includes military spending) being more likely to be either inefficient or diverted to personal consumption where the quality of government is low.
31. For a review of and answers to a number of such objections, see R. Di Tella and R. MacCulloch, ‘Some Uses of Happiness Data in Economics’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20 (2006), 25-46.
32. For a helpful survey of this evidence, see R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Penguin, 2005).
33. For example, see B. Radcliff, ‘Politics, Markets, and Life Satisfaction’, American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 939-52.