Subjective Well-being and Political Participation: a Cross-country Comparison

The aim of this work was to understand the relationship between subjective well-being and political participation in different countries of the world. The research topic seems important in the context of the increasing influence of political participation on people's lives in the conditions of democratization of society. In addition, we were motivated to write this work by the need to fill the gap in scientific knowledge, because among the publications we studied, there was no scientific work that would study the effect of subjective well-being on political participation using fresh cross-country data. In the course of the study, an analysis of theoretical sources on the topic under study was carried out, on the basis of which assumptions were made about the influence of subjective well-being on political participation: with an increase in the level of subjective well-being, the index of electoral participation rises, but the index of non-ectoral participation decreases. In addition, we hypothesized that the influence of subjective well-being on political participation increases in democracies. The following are the results of the study. The lower the level of subjective well-being of an individual, the higher the likelihood that a person will take part in protest activity. The higher the level of subjective well-being of an individual, the higher the likelihood that a person will take part in elections. The political regime does not influence the link between subjective well-being and non-electoral political participation. People living in democracies are more likely to vote than people living in countries with autocratic political regimes.