Institutional context and life satisfaction: does the rule of law moderate well-being inequalities?

ABSTRACT

An emerging strand of research emphasizes the role of the macro institutional context in shaping the social distribution of well-being. This article examines the variations in the association between political power and subjective well-being by how the rule of law is instituted across societies. Two hypotheses of the rule of law role are tested: (a) power-tempering and (b) power-enhancement hypotheses. We use a unique dataset of 30,491 individuals from 27 countries with diverse social and political characteristics. We first confirmed the relationship between individuals’ perceptions of their positions in the power hierarchy and their overall satisfaction with their lives using models with country-level fixed effects. Moreover, this relationship significantly varies across countries, and the Rule of Law Index explains part of the variation, as indicated by random-effects models. In societies with well-defined, universally applicable, and fair laws, the association of one’s position of power and subjective well-being is reduced. Our study illustrates that institutions of better quality and functioning may equalize access to well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Life satisfaction
• power
• institutions
• rule of law
• subjective well-being

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong (GRF-14618618). Dr. Olivos thanks the contribution of the RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This index shows a high degree of correlation with the country-level average of Corruption (ρ = -.75) and Law and Order (ρ = .76) Indexes reported by Gallup Poll and generated based on perceptions of the respondents. These correlations suggest a high degree of construct validity.

2 Household income is an important predictor of life satisfaction and a resource of power. Nevertheless, the survey in Venezuela did not include this question. Venezuela is going through one of the region's worst economic crises in recent history, making it impracticable to ask about household or personal income. Therefore, we estimate models without country-percentile household income as a control variable in the primary analyses and report a model with it in the supplementary material (Models 6.1 and 6.2 in Table 3S). The results are consistent. Therefore, we rule out a potential confounding effect of objective income.

3 Hong Kong has encountered a large wave of protests since May 2019 until the moment of writing, which could explain the feeling of powerlessness. Data was gathered in October 2019.

4 We also controlled Model 6.2 (Table 3S) in the supplementary material for the interactions between (1) subjective wealth and the Rule of Law Index, as well as between (2) household income and the Rule of Law Index. Results are consistent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee: [Grant Number GRF-14618618].

Notes on contributors

Francisco Olivos

Francisco Olivos is a Research Assistant Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research interests are stratification, cultural sociology, and subjective well-being.

Lei Jin

Lei Jin is associate professor at the Department of Sociology at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie in population health and health disparities.