{"id":70334,"date":"2017-07-05T09:55:19","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T14:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=70334"},"modified":"2017-07-08T23:34:18","modified_gmt":"2017-07-09T04:34:18","slug":"political-baseball-happiness-unhappiness-and-whose-team-is-winning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/07\/05\/political-baseball-happiness-unhappiness-and-whose-team-is-winning\/","title":{"rendered":"Political baseball: Happiness, unhappiness, and whose team is winning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are conservatives happier than liberals. Arthur Brooks thinks so. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. And he\u2019s happy, or at least he comes across as happy in his monthly op-eds for the Times.\u00a0 In those op-eds, he sometimes claims that conservatives are generally happier. When you\u2019re talking about the relation between political views and happiness, though\u00a0— as I<\/a> do<\/a> —\u00a0you ought to consider who is in power. Otherwise, it\u2019s like asking whether Yankee fans are happier than RedSox fans without checking the AL East standings.<\/p>\n

Now that the 2016 GSS data is out, we can compare the happiness of liberals and conservatives during the Bush years and the Obama years. The GSS happiness item asks, \u201cTaken all together, how would you say things are these days \u2013\u00a0 would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?\u201d<\/p>\n

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On the question of who is \u201cvery happy,\u201d it looks as though Brooks is onto something. More of the people on the right are very happy in both periods. But also note that in the Obama years about 12% of those very happy folks (five out of 40) stopped being very happy.But something else was happening during the Obama years. It wasn\u2019t just that some of the very happy conservatives weren\u2019t quite so happy. The opposition to Obama was not about happiness. Neither was the Trump campaign with its unrelenting negativism. What it showed was that a lot of people on the right were angry. None of that sunny Reaganesque “Morning in America: for them. That feeling is reflected in the numbers who told the GSS that they were \u201cnot too happy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Among extreme conservatives, the percent who were not happy doubled during the Obama years. The increase in unhappiness was about 60% for those who identified themselves as \u201cconservative\u201d (neither slight nor extreme).\u00a0 In the last eight years, the more conservative a person\u2019s views, the greater the likelihood of being not too happy. The pattern is reversed for liberals during the Bush years. Unhappiness rises as you more further left.<\/p>\n

The graphs also show that for those in the middle of the spectrum \u2013 about 60% of the people \u2013 politics makes no discernible change in happiness. Their proportion of \u201cnot too happy\u201d remained stable regardless of who was in the White House.\u00a0 Those middle categories do give support to Brook\u2019s idea that conservatives are generally somewhat happier. But as you move further out on the political spectrum the link between political views and happiness depends much more on which side is winning. Just as at Fenway or the Stadium, the fans who are cheering \u2013 or booing \u2013 the loudest are the ones whose happiness will be most affected by their team\u2019s won-lost record.<\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are conservatives happier than liberals. Arthur Brooks thinks so. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. And he\u2019s happy, or at least he comes across as happy in his monthly op-eds for the Times.\u00a0 In those op-eds, he sometimes claims that conservatives are generally happier. When you\u2019re talking about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":70335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[329,85,238,8121,20068,675],"class_list":["post-70334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-emotion","tag-politics","tag-election-2008","tag-election-2012","tag-politics-election-2016","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2017\/06\/2-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70334"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70401,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70334\/revisions\/70401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}