Citizens are happier in countries where the government intervenes more frequently in the economy

What types of public policy promote greater happiness among citizens? Patrick Flavin, Alexander C. Pacek and Benjamin Radcliff present results from an analysis of survey data across 21 industrialised democracies between 1981 and 2007. They find that in countries where governments intervene more frequently in the economy there is a higher degree of self-reported happiness among citizens. They note that while these findings cannot strictly be taken as evidence that social democratic policies are better in a normative sense overall, the results suggest that more research is required on the impact of a country’s political context on the happiness of its citizens

Patterns of elite-mass conflict in Soviet-type systems: 1948-1989

Following the political upheavals across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union throughout 1989, scholars of communist political systems began to reassess major theories concerning the durability of such regimes. This dissertation represents an effort to establish patterns of elite and mass political behavior across the region, and across time, and propose an explanation for shifts in these patterns. Examining the ebb and flow of collective action and elite response from 1948-1989 in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union, the dissertation develops a broad, general theory to explain such patterns. It argues that shifts in the levels of a country's socioeconomic development and enduring social cleavages will, in large part, account for the specific types of collective action (legal, extra-legal, illegal) and elite response (accommodation, reform, repression).U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio

Welfare Policy and Subjective Well-Being Across Nations: An Individual-Level Assessment

Welfare, Policy, Subjective well-being, Happiness, Life-satisfaction,

Political Participation among Informal Sector Workers in Mexico and Costa Rica Background on the Informal Sector

Introduction 1 This paper examines, in a comparative perspective, the relationship between organization and participation of informal sector workers in Mexico and Costa Rica. Specifically, we examine whether or not membership in an occupational organization increases or decreases the likelihood of engaging the political process. By engagement of the political process, we mean specifically the following political behaviors: volunteering for a political campaign, contacting a public official, and engaging in political protest. As we shall see, participation in an occupational organizations does increase the likelihood of engaging in political behaviors, even in different political settings such as Mexico and Costa Rica. Among the more recent works dealing with the politics of the informal sector in Latin America ar