Election Outcomes and Individual Subjective Wellbeing in Great Britain

Luke Munford, Daniel Gray, Harry Pickard

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Abstract

Exploiting novel longitudinal data on individuals in Great Britain matched to their parliamentary constituency, we find that supporting the incumbent political party, at both the national and constituency levels, exerts a positive influence on individual subjective wellbeing. This relationship varies across different measures of subjective wellbeing, gender and personal characteristics. We then implement a regression discontinuity in time design to estimate the impact of a quasi‐natural experiment, where we exploit the timing of the survey around the 2010 election date in order to identify a causal relationship. We find that Liberal Democrat supporters have approximately one‐unit higher level of overall life satisfaction after their party’s electoral success.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)809-837
Number of pages29
JournalEconomica
Volume88
Issue number351
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Feb 2021

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