Beyond the ballot box: linking political constraints and citizens’ happiness

Abstract

This study examines how political constraints influence happiness using entropy balancing on data from 125 countries over the period 2006–2021. The findings reveal a positive and statistically significant relationship. A one-standard-deviation increase in political constraints (0.233) is associated with an approximate 0.10-unit increase in happiness, corresponding to a standardised effect of 0.092 standard deviations. While this absolute effect size is modest, as is typical for macro-institutional variables, it carries population-level relevance when contextualised within the subjective well-being literature. These results remain robust across alternative measures of political constraints, diverse model specifications, heterogeneity analyses, and alternative estimation methods. Finally, we identify political and economic freedom, control of corruption, the rule of law, income redistribution, and employment as the main channels through which political constraints affect citizens’ happiness.