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Government and politics

Being politically conservative doesn't lead to greater happiness

Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals - but new study challenges assumptions about direction of this effect

17 August 2022

By Emma Young

Repeated studies have found that conservatives are happier than liberals,  and report more life satisfaction and better health. Why might this be? Perhaps conservatives are more likely to believe that society is generally fair, and so feel less anxious about inequalities. Perhaps it’s down to differences in personality traits - at least one study has found that conservatives also feel that they have more control over their lives, which is linked to greater wellbeing.

Whatever the exact mechanism, write the authors of a new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, most of the studies in this area share the same, un-evidenced assumption that being conservative drives greater wellbeing, rather than the other way around. Now Salvador Vargas Salfate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleagues report results from two longitudinal studies that explore this assumption. Their findings challenge some fundamental ideas in the field.

For their first, study, the team looked at data on 8,740 participants from 19 different countries, including Estonia, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, the US and the UK. Twice, six months apart, these participants completed brief self-report measures of their life satisfaction, anxiety, depression and health status, and reported their political views on 10-point scales that ranged from strong liberal to strong conservative.

When the team took social status, gender, age and income into account in their analysis, they found no evidence that conservatism was linked to greater later life satisfaction or better self-reported health six months later.

However, the data came from only two time points, just six months apart, limiting its usefulness. So the team then turned to participants in an ongoing survey of a nationally representative sample of adults in Chile. This time, they could analyse survey responses that had been made every year for three years.

Again, they found no evidence that being conservative led to greater wellbeing. “Specifically, we did not find associations between conservatism and depression and health status over time,” they report. In fact, in one analysis, they found that conservatism was linked to lower life satisfaction. In others, though, they found that higher life satisfaction was linked to greater later conservatism.

This latter link might support the idea that people who are already high in wellbeing are more motivated to feel supportive of the status quo and to ignore injustice, which leads them to become more conservative. However, the team also warns that this link was found in only some of their analyses, and should not be considered a firm finding.

There are various limitations to the work, such as the limited sample of countries and time-spans of the data collections. However, most of the findings clearly challenge the assumption that conservatism drives happiness. “In this research, we showed that despite the plausibility of the theory stating that liberals and conservatives have different psychological profiles, conservatism does not predict wellbeing over time,” the team writes.

In fact, their analysis suggests that it’s greater subjective social status, rather than conservatism, that is linked to greater wellbeing: when they took measures of subjective social status into account in their analyses, any links between conservatism and wellbeing vanished. And that’s a finding supported by no end of other studies. This could be, then, yet another example of a liberal/conservative division that fades in the face of detailed research.