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Is Your Government Making You Sad?: Measuring the direct and indirect effects of government quality on reported levels of happiness in multiple world populations (306639)

Keywords: Happiness, linear regression, indirect effects, direct effects

Happiness is extremely important for the overall well-being of people. To obtain an understanding of how different factors contribute to happiness, we analyzed data from the World Happiness Report. A linear regression analysis was performed to analyze the effects of the following direct and indirect variables on happiness: overall wealth, social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, positive affect, perceived corruption in government, confidence in government, democratic quality of government and delivery of government. We found that factors such as overall wealth (? = 0.28, p = 0.00), life expectancy (? = 0.02, p = 0.01) and the freedom to make life choices (? = 1.54, p = 0.00) are correlated with perceived levels of happiness. We found that government-associated factors, such as the perception of corruption (? = -0.91, p = 0.00) and low levels of confidence in the national government (? = -1.28, p = 0.00), were also correlated with perceived levels of happiness. These findings suggest that personal happiness can be affected by both direct and indirect factors, including government.