56 International The EconomistJuly 13th 2019
2 the European Parliament, the populist
Brexit Party came from nowhere to top the
polls. In France Marine Le Pen’s National
Rally was the largest party and in Italy the
Northern League doubled its share of the
vote compared with the general election of- It is true that some incumbents and
centrists also did reasonably well. A centre-
right party has just won in Greece and the
centre-left topped the polls in Spain in
April. But by and large the parties that long
dominated European politics have been
the biggest losers in elections. Voters seem
miserable and want change.
But when you look at indicators of hap-
piness you find exactly the opposite mes-
sage. Voters are satisfied. According to Eu-
robarometer, the European Union’s polling
organisation, the proportion of Germans
who consider themselves very or fairly sat-
isfied with life has risen from 73% in 2003
to 93% in 2017, a substantial increase in a
measure that in most of the world, most of
the time, is fairly stable. In Britain the share
went from 88% to 93%, and the share of
those pronouncing themselves very satis-
fied soared from 31% to 45% in 2003-17, a re-
markable change. In the eu as a whole, the
share of those who say they are very or fair-
ly satisfied rose from 77% in 1997 to 82%
two decades later.
Happiness is the truth
These “life satisfaction” measures are
backed by other indicators, which suggest
the findings are of something real. The ma-
jority of Europeans, Eurobarometer finds,
think their household finances are “rather
good”. Most say they trust the army, the po-
lice, the courts, even television. Yet they
are not voting as if they are satisfied. They
are choosing populist, new or special-in-
terest parties, not incumbents. Moreover,
these parties are often getting a third of the
vote—a higher share than the bit of the
population which says it is dissatisfied
(which is below 20% in most countries).
Happy voters must be backing insurgents
and populists. Why is the link between
happiness and incumbency breaking?
One possible answer is to say that sup-
port 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 or-
ganisation, 64% of voters over 65 voted to
leave the eu, compared with only 29% of 18-
to 24-year-olds. Measures of well-being
leap up everywhere once you reach about- But even if Brexit reflects Britain’s care-
free pensioners—and some evidence sug-
gests that despite being older, Brexit voters
were stroppier than average—there is little
sign of such an age effect elsewhere. Sup-
port for other European populists—the Na-
tional Rally, the League, afdand so on—
mostly decreases with age. These are par-
ties of young and middle-aged workers, not
cheery pensioners.
A second possibility is that happiness is
influencing politics but not the kind that is
usually studied. Psychologists distinguish
between two sorts: “evaluative” and “he-
donic”. Evaluative measures answer the
question: how do you evaluate your life at
the moment? Hedonic ones answer the
question: were you angry, or happy, or wor-
ried yesterday? Politicians tend to assume
that evaluative happiness matters more in
determining how people vote. But that
might be wrong.
The World Happiness Report finds that
indicators of the average frequency of wor-
ry, sadness and anger on the previous day
rose slightly in western Europe in 2010-18,
even though general life satisfaction was
increasing. Perhaps a decline in hedonic
happiness lies behind the upsurge in sup-
port for populists, swamping the rise in
evaluative happiness.
Scraps of evidence support the idea that
voters are indeed slaves to emotional
whim, not people making rational judg-
ments about which political party is most
likely to contribute to their future happi-
ness. Dr Liberini’s study discovered not
only that happy people backed incumbents
but that unhappy ones blamed govern-
ments for things that could not possibly be
their fault. The death of a spouse, for exam-
ple, reduced the likelihood of voting for an
incumbent by 10%, compared with a con-
trol group.
An American study from 2010 titled “Ir-
relevant events affect voters’ evaluation of
government performance” came to a simi-
lar conclusion. College football and basket-
ball games had a discernible effect on sen-
ate and governors’ races, pushing up votes
for incumbents when local favourites won.
Similarly, a study of 400 ballot proposi-
tions in Switzerland between 1958 and 2014found that rain increases people’s risk
aversion and rain on voting day reduced
support for changing the status quo. Swit-
zerland’s “deliberative democracy” seems
not to feature much deliberation.
Finally, it is possible that populists do
well in countries with lots of happy people,
even if happy people are less likely to vote
for populists. This might be, suggests Cas
Mudde of the University of Georgia, be-
cause such countries tend to be richer, and
so economic concerns can take second
place to social and cultural matters such as
immigration, race and religion.Because I’m happy
If so, that would explain why support for
extremists seemed to have increased (rath-
er than fallen) as economies recovered
from the 2008-09 financial crisis. A grow-
ing economy gives voters confidence to
take a punt on parties which might seem ir-
responsible when unemployment is high
or gdp is falling. Long ago, Seymour Martin
Lipset, an American social scientist, point-
ed out that the high point of membership
of the Ku Klux Klan was the gilded 1920s
and McCarthyism blossomed in the
prosperous 1950s.
Matthijs Rooduijn of Utrecht University
and Brian Burgoon of the University of Am-
sterdam looked at support for radical par-
ties in 21 European countries from 2002 to- They found that people who thought
they were being left behind were less will-
ing to vote for the radical right when the
economy was weak (though support for the
radical left was stronger). But when the
economy recovered, support for the far
right rose. Perhaps the most dangerous
moment for an unpopular regime really is
when things start to improve.
One last factor to consider is less to do
with voters than with politicians. This is
that populists are using social media more
adeptly than mainstream parties are. In the
first three months of this year France’s Na-
tional Rally and Germany’s afdgenerated
about 40% of all posts related to the Euro-
pean election campaign from political
groups on Facebook in France and Ger-
many. In Britain posts linking to the Brexit
Party generated more shares than the posts
for all other parties combined. In Italy’s
general election in 2018, the League and the
Five Star Movement dominated Facebook.
Maybe the number of unhappy voters is not
rising. Maybe it is just that thanks to the in-
ternet, populists are getting better at find-
ing (or creating) them.
None of this means that happiness has
suddenly become irrelevant to the craft of
politics. What it suggests is that the simple
formula—politicians make voters happier,
voters return them to power—needs re-
finement. The pursuit of happiness may be
an inalienable right but the political re-
wards for increasing it are uncertain. 7