Effects of the political configuration of local governments on subjective well-being

ABSTRACT

Determining what makes a person happy is an extremely complicated task. The objective of this article is to identify the effects of the composition and orientation of governance bodies in municipalities on individual subjective well-being. We connect the data from a large Spanish welfare survey to municipal data covering the aforementioned dimensions of political configuration. Unlike previous country-level studies, we find no significant effects of political orientation when applied to municipal data. In contrast, political alternation emerges as a relevant driver of subjective well-being, especially when corrupt local governments are replaced. Furthermore, the fragmentation in the Spanish political landscape after the 2015 elections improved the level of political competition, which, in turn, exerted a positive effect on subjective well-being.

JEL CODES:

• H75, M41, I31, I38

KEYWORDS:

• Good governance
• subjective well-being
• political competition
• local government
• Spain

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) for providing access to some of the data required for this study. We also thank all the regional and local authorities that gave us access to data that were not available in the public databases and the comments received at the WellBeing 2022 and EWEPA17 conferences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The survey is conducted on an annual basis, and 25% of the individuals in the sample are replaced with new respondents every year. Therefore, every 4 years the sample is completely renewed.

2 The material conditions variables (income and wealth and housing) are not identical to the variables used in Arrondo, Cárcaba, and González (2020). The reason is that we wanted to use exactly the same variables in 2013 and 2018, but some of the indicators were not included by the INE in the 2019 survey. Fortunately, the surveys include two variables which are appropriate to measure these dimensions.

3 The SWB INE’s survey does not identify the municipality of the individual for reasons of statistical confidentiality. For the purpose of this research, the INE linked the individual SWB data to our municipal database, so that each individual is associated with the governance data that corresponds to the municipality of residence.

4 This website is an initiative of the Spanish supervision bodies (the national Tribunal de Cuentas and the regional external control agencies). In the case of the municipalities from the Basque Country and Navarra, their supervisory bodies do not report to the cited website and the information was obtained from their regional websites. We also had to check most of the local governments’ web sites in these two ACs.

5 We must note, however, that Ciudadanos has almost disappeared in 2023 and Podemos has lost much support after being part of a national coalition government. However, the electoral landscape is equally fragmented with the raise of the far-right Vox and the far-left platform Sumar.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Cárcaba

Ana Cárcaba is associate professor of accounting at University of Oviedo (Spain). She has coordinated the Master degree in accounting information systems and has been the academic secretary of the Oviedo Business School. Her research interests are the disclosure of financial information, public management, municipal well-being and quality of life. She has published in related impact journals such as Local Government Studies, Omega, Social Indicators Research, Journal of Public Health, the Spanish Review of Financial Economics, etc.

Eduardo González

Eduardo González is full professor of management and head of the Department of Business at University of Oviedo (Spain). He has been the academic secretary and deputy director of the Oviedo Business School where he coordinated the MBA programme. His research interests include public management, efficiency analysis, well-being and quality of life studies. He has published papers in related journals such as Omega, European J. of Operational Research, Research Policy, Social Indicators Research, Local Government Studies, etc.

Rubén Arrondo

Rubén Arrondo is associate professor of finance at University of Oviedo (Spain). He has been the academic secretary and the deputy director of the Department of Business and the director of the family business chair. His research interests are corporate governance, public management and quality of life. He has published in impact journals such as Corporate Governance, Journal of Family Business Strategy, the Spanish Review of Financial Economics, Business Research Quarterly, etc.