Happiness by Tim Lomas

Author:Tim Lomas [Lomas, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Happiness; wellbeing; flourishing; thriving
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Governance

Considerations around issues like equality bring us to a nexus of influences encompassed by the label governance. This encapsulates the way people’s lives are shaped by top-down societal power structures and dynamics, such as the policies enacted by those vested with authority. Two of the six factors identified by the 2020 WHR as most contributing to variation among countries, for instance, were freedom and corruption. These are not only determined by governance of course; freedom can be conceived in individualized terms as a belief in one’s autonomy and self-efficacy. Yet analysis of these topics has also focused on the role of governance in their realization.

With freedom, sociologist Ruut Veenhoven defines this as “the possibility to choose”—a formulation harnessed in the GWP item on which the WHR analysis is based (“Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”).67 This has two components: the capacity and opportunity to choose. The former is an individual quality (as per theories of self-efficacy), but the latter is a governance issue, dependent on regulations, norms, and structures in a society. This matters greatly, with Veenhoven calculating that differences in this area explain 44 percent of the variation in happiness among nations.68

Veenhoven identifies three main types of freedom relating to governance. First, there is economic freedom, for which the Index of Economic Freedom identifies four dimensions: the rule of law, government size, regulatory efficiency, and market openness.69 Second, there is political freedom, with Freedom House emphasizing three dimensions: the electoral process, political pluralism and participation, and government functioning.70 Third, there is civil freedom, with the Index of Economic Freedom articulating four dimensions: freedom of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, the rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights.71 These are all interrelated, with high correlations in Veenhoven’s analysis between economic and political (r = 0.69), economic and civil (0.58), and political and civil (0.66) freedoms.

Moreover, besides freedom, governance affects happiness in numerous ways. As noted above, corruption was another key factor in the WHR analysis. The control of corruption is also one of the six indicators used by the World Bank in global assessments of governmental quality, alongside voice and accountability (civil rights), stability, bureaucratic effectiveness, regulatory framework (economic policies), and rule of law (efficacious legal systems).72 These indicators overlap with the freedoms above, particularly voice and accountability and rule of law.

Thus governance processes significantly affect well-being. An analysis of multiple surveys across fifty-five countries found that three factors showed especially strong and replicable relationships with happiness: income (discussed above), individualism (explored below), and human rights.73 For the latter, the researchers used a framework delineating forty different rights, aggregated into three dimensions: gross human rights violations (e.g., detention without charge), civil rights (e.g., independent courts), and political rights (e.g., press freedom).74 Based on such research, it is increasingly acknowledged that happiness partly depends on “effective social and political institutions.”75

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