Does Society Matter? Life Satisfaction in the Enlarged Europe

Abstract

Life satisfaction, Quality of society, Europe, Multilevel analysis, Social structure, International comparison,

Determinants of Life Satisfaction Among Immigrants from Western Countries and from the FSU in Israel

“…According to Diener (1984), in order to capture the individual's judgment and not the researcher's, life satisfaction should be measured by asking individuals to rate their satisfaction with life as a whole, instead of summing their satisfaction across specific imposed areas. This understanding is shared by other researchers in the field (e.g., Kahneman and Krueger 2006;Litwin 2005;Bohnke 2008;Bonini 2008).…”

“…Studies show that increases in income are associated with increases in life satisfaction (Diener et al 1993). In another recent study testing life satisfaction across countries in Europe, the standard of living was found to have a significant positive effect on life satisfaction in most countries, whereas social capital (represented by social contacts and social support) had a significant effect in only some of them (Bohnke 2008). Other studies indicate that education often results in improved social relationships and higher earnings, which in turn enhance satisfaction (Helliwell 2003).…”

“…This question has been addressed in many studies (e.g., Bonini 2008;Bohnke 2008;Litwin 2005). Life satisfaction was found to be associated with a range of individual background characteristics.…”

Surviving the Transformation: Social Quality in Central Asia and the Caucuses

“…However, the perceived quality of the society also has an independent influence, especially on satisfaction (Bohnke 2005(Bohnke , 2008, as does social support, which generally becomes more important the higher the level of prosperity of the country, with family support being more important in poorer countries and friends in more affluent countries. The general pattern is that the lower the level of the GDP of a country, the lower the level of satisfaction throughout the population, with a greater variance in general satisfaction in poorer countries than in more affluent ones.…”

EU enlargement and satisfaction with democracy: a peculiar case of immiserizing growth

“…Our analysis is thus more embedded into the respective literature on SWD, that is the second line of literature. Early work by Anderson and Reichert (1995) traces attitudes towards EU-membership still very much back to perceived (economic) costs and benefits; Jaime-Castillo (2006) and Eichenberg and Dalton (2007) add distributional issues in addition to macroperformance as measured, for instance, by GDP; Böhnke (2008) stresses the conditional effects of societal circumstances. Rohrschneider andLoveless (2007, 2010) consider a mixture of economic and political criteria important, with the weights depending on the economic status quo.…”