There is an elegant paradox in political science which does a lot to explain the confused nature of politics in Europe today. Surveys consistently find that people who live in countries run on social democratic lines are happier than those in neoliberal ones. Thus, Scandinavians are happier than Americans or British people. But if you do the measurements at an individual level, the pattern is reversed: people of conservative views are happier than progressives.
Three American scientists have looked at this phenomenon with a huge data sample: polls of more than a million people in 16 western European countries between 1970 and 2002, which asked people how happy they were (the jargon is “subjective wellbeing”). The effect, they find, stands up to examination. So how to explain it?
The answer appears to be that there are two different mechanisms in place. In objective terms, people are happier in countries with a well-developed safety net, so that unemployment, ill-health and old age are setbacks rather than catastrophes. But at the same time people are temperamentally happier if they feel they are living in a just and well-ordered society, whatever the reality may be. That is the conservative temperament. It goes along with a belief that people deserve what they get in life, and that is inimical to schemes of social improvement.
A sharp way to put this is to say that social democratic states are built by people outraged by injustice, but this does not make the builders lastingly happier because to be outraged by injustice is a recipe for constant unhappiness.
Clearly, then, the happiest people in Europe are conservatives who live in objectively social democratic states, where they can feel that the poor get what they deserve without needing themselves to be frightened by the threat of a descent into poverty.
Such people were in fact the backbone of the post-1945 welfare states: in Sweden they were the Social Democrats who were also strongly nationalist; in England they were Labour rightwingers. Presumably they had their equivalents in Germany (Christian Democrats) and France. People who never lived in Sweden easily miss how conservative the country was, how fond of order, and – paradoxically – how highly it valued self-reliance as well as collective action.
What has happened to them since? If the happiest combination of temperament and political environment is to be a conservative in a social democratic (or, as Americans call it, “liberal”) state, it need not necessarily follow that the most miserable person is a liberal in a conservative state: what happens to a conservative – someone who thinks the present order is largely just, and people get what they deserve – when the protections of social democracy start to be demolished?
Objectively their situation is getting worse. Ill-health, unemployment and old age all start to look much more threatening. To maintain their belief in the essential benevolence of the social order, they must either conclude that they are themselves less deserving, or that someone or something external is twisting it. Neither conclusion makes for happiness. Both, in fact, will induce rage and confusion.
Right now, rage and confusion are hugely important in European politics. From Ukip through the Sweden Democrats, the National Front in France and even the SNP, all the passion seems to come from people feeling they have been cheated. If they were not conservative by temperament, they would assume that the system was unfair to everyone, but it turns out that they believe the system is fair to other losers, and only unjust to them.
It’s obviously wrong to try to reduce politics to temperament, and not just because the attempt almost always ends up by explaining away opposing views as an expression of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. But I think this study shows that some kind of temperamental bias does play a political role, irrespective of the policies to which it is applied. The interesting thing would be to discover what social factors actively promote a belief that the system is just and fair. The answer is not self-evidently “social democratic ones”, even if it should be.
