Vote for happiness

What makes you happy? If you did not think anybody cared, you could not be more wrong. Your happiness has become a major issue. It is being investigated by professors with regression analyses. It is being fussed over by politicians who want to show their human side.

The British government has decided to measure your happiness. Over in Paris, the OECD has recently come out with a major report on well-being. There is a growing band of academics studying your happiness, including Professors Layard and Oswald in Britain and Professors Gui and Becchetti in Italy.

One of this growing band of happiness professors is Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich. He is appropriately smiley and cheerful and has come upon an aspect of happiness which surely has considerable political meaning. He has produced serious, academic evidence that democracy makes you happy. Or at least, other things being equal, democracy makes you happier than you otherwise would be.

He conducted an experiment. He took a survey which had already been done, in which people were asked about how happy they were. More than 6,000 people across Switzerland were asked to rate their happiness from one to ten. He then analysed the extent of direct democracy and autonomy in the 26 cantons of Switzerland in which they lived. Each canton has its own constitution and way of operating. In some of them, access to direct democracy — in the form of a referendum — is easier than in others.

What he discovered was a clear correlation between the amount of democracy in the cantons and the happiness reported. So, for example, the canton of Basel Land, which is near but does not include the city of Basel, had the highest democracy rating of 5.69