PERSONAL HAPPINESS AND POLITICAL SYSTEM

Happiness and Political Institutions

The study of individual happiness has enriched economics with many new and sometimes challenging (preliminary) insights.1 More and more often, it is asked about the policy consequences that are to be derived from these insights. We observe that economic research on happiness has an explicit or implicit tendency to follow a “benevolent dictator” approach where the government, and individual poli...

Political economy of happiness

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Personal, Interpersonal, and Political Temperaments

Personal Ethics and Political Ethics∗

The moral ambit understood in the generic sense, as that which is opposed to the amoral has an identical extension to that of the ambit of freedom. Private life as well as professional, economic, and political life are equally moral realities. Together with personal ethics there also exist professional ethics, economic ethics, social ethics, and political ethics. Here, we will not discuss the d...

“Personal Influence”: Social Context and Political Competition

We study a model of electoral competition where voters obtain information on candidates’ platforms through campaign advertising, and word-of-mouth communication. We show that when the costs of campaign advertising are low, an increase in word-of-mouth communication among voters causes polarization. In particular, the more voters can exchange political information between each other, the more of...