Republicans are Happier

by Will Wilkinson on February 14, 2006

The Pew poll mentioned below confirms a longstanding trend: Republicans say they are happier than Democrats. This year, 45% of Republicans said they were “very” happy as opposed to 29% of Democrats. That’s a big gap! Here’s the the 30+ year trendline from Pew:

This stability is interesting in part because, I take it, that the demographic composition of Republican and Democratic voters has changed not insignificantly over the last 30 years. Is that right? Anyway, what accounts for Dem.-Rep. gap? Well, it’s not income. Republicans report themselves as happier at all points on the income distribution, as this Pew graph shows:

So what’s the deal? Here’s the Pew folk

[The regression] analysis shows that the most robust correlations of all those described in this report are health, income, church attendance, being married, and, yes, being a Republican. Indeed, being a Republican is associated not only with happiness, it is also associated with every other trait in the cluster.

Clean-livin’ Christians are more likely to be in good health, go to church, be married, and vote Republican.
What doesn’t the study mean? In today’s Colorado Springs Gazette, hometown paper of the Focus on the Family folk, I am quoted thus:

Does membership in the GOP really make people happy? Probably not, said Will Wilkinson, who studies happiness for the Cato Institute. The bliss is probably connected to some other facet of life that also inclines people to be Republicans, he said.

“People might read that and say, ‘I’d like to be happy, maybe I should be a Republican.’ It definitely doesn’t mean that,” Wilkinson said.

Sorry Dobsonites!

Assuming that the entire Dem.-Rep. difference doesn’t disappear when controlling for demographic variables, what psychological traits would you guess predict both higher self-reports and Republicanism?

Viewing 22 Comments

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    That's interesting. I guess libertarians really aren't cheerier (than conservatives, anyway).
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    As to the actual question, I think the answer lies in the correlation between church attendance and Republican party membership. And probably wealth and Republican party membership too.
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    Or not that second one since I somehow completely forgot that second graph. Duh. But yeah, I'm going with religiosity.
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    Has anyone studied the gap when Clinton was in power? Maybe Democrats are unhappy because they don't control any part of the federal government.
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    Look at the trend chart! There is no patterned relationship between partisan happiness and who is in power.
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    Okay, I'll just point out Tim Blair's post again here where it's a little more appropriate. It's not just Republicans, in other words, and it's not just in America -- in general, the political right seems happier than the left. As you say, it's not likely that a choice of politics can make you happy (or not), but it's at least plausible that causation works the other way -- happiness (or not) will lead one to make certain political choices.
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    Those of delicate sensibilities please forgive the following ill-considered and sweeping generalization:

    I think that churchgoing conservatives are more or less content with the order of the cosmos, and don't see a great many opportunities for humans to improve on the inherent nature of things. The left, on the other hand, attracts folks who believe that through human effort, we can redress the fundamental unfairness of the universe, or the market, or the weather, or whatever. That idea carries an inherent sense of discontent.

    I'd like to see how happiness reports compare to the old "is the country headed in the right direction" question. Can people maintain happiness even while they think the nation (or world) is going to hell in a handbasket? I'd have to assume so, since that's a prevalent conservative sensibility (though not one I share).
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    Will, I read about this poll earlier, and immediately began wondering about the connection between self-reported happiness and some of the psychological traits associated with conservativism. I was thinking, in particular, of this study, of which I'm sure you're aware. There have been some objections to the research described in that paper, in the literature, but the research has stood up to further tests designed to handle those objections (e.g., the studies in this paper). The question would then be: do lower tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, and lower openness to experience, along with the other traits associated with the "rigidity of the right" hypothesis, somehow lead to greater happiness? I honestly don't think psychologists would be surprised to find that, in most cases, they do.
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    Matt: The left, on the other hand, attracts folks who believe that through human effort, we can redress the fundamental unfairness of the universe, or the market, or the weather, or whatever.

    But if you believed that such unfairness can be redressed through human effort, why would you be unhappy? I believe that, at least, and I'm not unhappy. But I'm not (any more) on the left, either.

    What if, instead, the left attracts those who are chronically or inherently unhappy, discontented, or whatever, since it provides a political excuse for this malaise? That might explain why no amount of improvement ever assuages the fairly constant level of leftist "unhappiness" wouldn't it?

    (With apologies, like Matt's, to those of delicate sensibilities.)
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    Chris, Yeah. The funny thing is, the poll is picking up a n effect of party affiliation, not just ideology. So conservatives who happen to vote Democrat are less happy than Republicans at the same point on the liberal-conservative continuum. Similarly, liberal Repubs are happier than equally liberal Democrats. That's weird and interesting!

    As an aside, I give an openness to experience questionnaire during a talk about persuasion, to bring home the point that what people are likely to accept is a function of their personality (so don't think your dazzling arguments will have much of an effect on most people). I've only done this in libertarian audiences, and it's interesting to find that most libertarians come out pretty hard on the openness side, predicting Democratic voting patterns. But most in those group who vote vote Republican. So we libertarians are a little weird.
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    Will, it'd be interesting to do the research, anyway. Are people with lower openness to experience (and so on) happier? Like I said, I don't think psychologists would be surprised to find that they are.
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    Chris, Yeah. I'd like to know that, too. I wouldn't be surprised, either. I know my own openness to experience (I score on the extreme of the oppeness scale--I'm sloppy, I don't keep a schedule, I don't make lists, I was an art major, etc...) can cause a lot of uncertainty and confusion. I'm happiest precisely when I pull my shit together and start acting from my Mormon bourgeois values.

    Actually here's a fun one. I'd like to see credit scores v. openness to experience v. political affiliation v. self-reported happiness.
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    The funny thing is, the poll is picking up a n effect of party affiliation, not just ideology. So conservatives who happen to vote Democrat are less happy than Republicans at the same point on the liberal-conservative continuum. Similarly, liberal Repubs are happier than equally liberal Democrats.

    - Is it possible that conservatism is less an ideology and more a state of mind? Liberal Republicans want to preserve something they feel central to the party: Dewey and Rockefeller Republicanism allowed the party to have significant electoral gains, and bettered the country in some ways (Rudy ain't exactly a conservative). And of course, more conservative Republicans are just that: they're happy with the ancestral, and wish to preserve it. The emotion involved might be "I'm happy with the way things are," and that might be the real key to conservatism, and I would describe the Republican party as conservative, yes. It has liberal members that react to the conservative members more often than not, as opposed to going off on their own crusades (Sens. McCain and Hagel are exceptions to this, of course).

    Is it also possible that liberalism works the same way? That the feeling is things have to change, whether one is a more conservative Democrat or not? A more conservative Democrat would probably mean someone like Martin Sheen, who is pro-life, but very activist. Zell Miller wasn't exactly quiet, either.

    And yeah, I want to try and explain conservatism and liberalism as products of a state of mind, because the parties, to me, sell themselves and achieve coherence through the rough national ideology, even though there is so much diversity within them it isn't even funny.
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    Possibly related: Republicans report greater satisfaction with their sex lives, too. Why? The most likely explanation is that Republicans skew male, and men are more likely to say they enjoy their sex lives.

    So maybe the greater happiness of Republicans is just capturing the fact that sex brings greater happiness, but that's more true for men than women, and men are more likely than women to be Republicans.
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    Chris: ...do lower tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, and lower openness to experience, along with the other traits associated with the “rigidity of the right” hypothesis, somehow lead to greater happiness? I honestly don’t think psychologists would be surprised to find that, in most cases, they do.

    In light of this paper -- showing that academic psychologists exhibit a more pronounced self-identified liberal skew than most disciplines within an already heavily biased institution -- I honestly wouldn't be surprised either. I would be surprised to find that, when it comes to ideology at least, psychologists find anything other than what they set out to find.

    As for the party affiliation phenomenon, I wouldn't be too quick to rule out ideology -- whatever it is that causes a particular choice of party affiliation may have deeper roots than conscious responses to particular issues (with which we associate "liberal" and "conservative" labels). And finally I'd caution against identifying those labels, in their contemporary American political forms particularly, with simple personality generalizations -- is the ideological left-liberal really "open to experience"? Is the libertarian or evangelical right-conservative really "happy with the way things are"?
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    It might be interesting to test to see if there's any correlation with problem-solving styles: the kind of thing tested by assessments such as the Kirton Adaption–Innovation Inventory. If people with different political viewpoints come at problems in different ways, perhaps there's a difference not only in how they see problems (and problem-solving) but in how they feel about such problems. I guess if you wanted to test uncertainty avoidance itself, you could go sociologist Geert Hofstede's work.
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    Larry, it's problematic to cite the Rothman et al. study, because there are some clear flaws in their methodology, and they refuse to let others see their data. In my experience, as a psychologist, psychology departments are more liberal than engineering departments, but less liberal than anthropology departments. But my experience is pretty limited (I am only very familiar with about 15 departments, and within those departments, only with the cognitive people -- I suspect social psychologists skew more to the left than cognitive psychologists). However, I'm not sure their political ideology is really relevant to what they'd expect to find in relation to happiness and personality traits, since there's actually a substantial amount of research on that sort of thing from which they could draw.

    For example a meta-analysis conducted a few years ago correlated subjective well-being with 137 different personality traits, and found that the traits most positively associated with positive affect and happiness were:
    repressive-defensiveness
    trust
    emotional stability (duh!)
    locus of control-chance
    desire for control
    hardiness
    positive affectivity (duh again)
    private collective self-esteem
    and tension

    Repressive-defensiveness, desire for control, and trust just happen to be traits associated with lower tolerance for ambiguity and dogmaticism, two of the traits associated with conservativism in the papers I linked before.

    Oh, the citation is:
    DeNeve, K.M., & Cooper, H. (1998). The happy personality: a meta-analysis of 137 personality traits and subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 197-229.
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    Chris,

    You know, it's just my experience, but I've noticed that there's almost always a methodological flaw in studies that discomfort one's ideological prefererences -- a surprising yet consoling correlation. That observation could and should be tested, of course, but, as in other observations, I wouldn't be surprised to find it confirmed.

    Thanks for the citation, though. I took a quick look at it and ... well, I really think you need to read more carefully. The traits you listed all correlate highly with SWB alright -- but both positively and negatively. In fact, "repressive-defensiveness" is one of the traits most negatively correlated with SWB (-.32) (along with "rebellious-distrustful" at -.35). On the other hand, traits associated with "openness to experience", such as "self-confidence" (.38) and "self-respect" (.31) were among the most positively correlated. Combining the two studies, I'd say that the hypothesis that the contemporary left attracts a significantly higher percentage of the neurotically unhappy than the right is strengthened. As is the observation that psychologists tend to find (read) what they're ideologically inclined to find.
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    Larry, first: my ideological stance has nothing to do with the fact that, as has been well documented (including in subsequent issues of Forum), there are clear methodological problems with that study, which make it difficult, if not impossible, to explain the disparity with their data. It's also not a fact, which has nothing to do with my ideology, that they refuse to give out their data, which should make anyone think twice before citing a study for which they gave a very bare-bones description.

    Second, you're right about the study you cited. In my notes, I had all of those correlations as positive. My notes were clearly wrong. Sorry about that.
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    Chris, thanks for the correction. So, can we agree that, in answer to Will's question at the end of his post, and using the study you cited, the one general psychological trait that would predict both higher self-reported happiness and "Republicanism" is just absence of "neuroticism"?

    Re: the bias among academics study -- I'd like to have the authors' side of the story before coming to my own conclusions regarding your allegations. But, be that as it may, my point wasn't personal -- it related to the more general point that ideology so permeates the social "sciences" in general (the reason for the scare quotes) that studies or "findings" which flatter their political predilections deserve, and usually receive, special skepticism, among all but the most biased or credulous.
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    Democrats are more likely than Republicans, overall, to believe in class warfare, and to believe that the rich get their wealth at the expense of the poor. This can cause resentment in the lower class and guilt in the upper. Perhaps Democrats are somewhat more likely to judge their happiness based on what others have.

    Interesting that it seems to happen even when one corrects for ideology, though I wonder exactly the methodology.

    But if you believed that such unfairness can be redressed through human effort, why would you be unhappy?

    Because the unfairness is still there, and that must be someone's fault, perhaps even the fault of a shadowy evil conspiracy. There are exceptions, certainly, "Happy Warriors" like Hubert Humphrey, and dour pessimists, but it seems like in generall the idea that any blemish is the result of preventable human fault or mistake rather than the natural, expected state of a fallen imperfect world tends to make people less happy.

    Republicans report greater satisfaction with their sex lives, too. Why? The most likely explanation is that Republicans skew male, and men are more likely to say they enjoy their sex lives.

    I've seen several surveys showing that Republican women
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    I'm going to go with blissful ignorance being the key factor. I know whereof I speak since I was raised in a conservative, but not rich or even middle class, family. I voted Republican for years as an adult even though it always seemed like the Democrats were actually the ones who were more interested in helping people instead of lining their own pockets and wearing their religion on their their sleeves but not in their hearts.

    You see, I used to believe what I had been taught about Republicans being tough and not backing down in international affairs and that the Democrats were cowardly. Imagine my shock when I finally found out that most of the high-ranking Repubs and their talking heads (e.g. Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, Savage, etc...) never served in the military and many of the Dems that they considered cowardly actually had served. It was also a big shock to find out that most of said talking heads were early college drop-outs who had no idea what the hell they were talking about on AM radio and in their books. I was a bit surprised also to find out that the "evil" Democrats weren't godless, quite a few were actually religious, they just don't play that card.

    I was a lot happier back then when I had blind faith in the Republicans. That all changed the moment I took my head out of the send (or wherever else I had it buried for all of those years).
 

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