Субъективное благополучие и революционная дестабилизация: Опыт количественного анализа

Abstract

The subjective well-being of the population - or the 'level of happiness' - is a popular topic for scientific research and socio-political discussions both domestically and internationally. In this regard, a direction of research is gaining traction; its proponents consider the level of happiness to be a predictor of the current socio-political stability. An analysis of the literature revealed that, despite the abundance of works on the topic of subjective wellbeing, its relationship with income - as well as with the political activity of the population - there are only a few articles devoted to the analysis of the impact of this indicator on socio-political instability. This article attempts to carry out a cross-country analysis of the impact of deviations in subjective well-being below the value that would be expected at the given level of economic development. The proposed quantitative analysis has made it possible to reveal the presence of a statistically significant influence of this deviation on the revolutionary activity of both an armed and unarmed nature. It is noteworthy that the identified patterns do not apply to all groups of countries - only to middle-income economies - and that each subgroup also has its own patterns. Thus, the mean values of subjective life satisfaction, which are lower than what could be expected with the given level of economic development, are significant predictors of the risks of armed revolutionary insurgencies in lower middle-income countries. At the same time, in upper middle-income countries, they are already predictors of unarmed revolutionary uprisings.