State Government Control and Partisan Happiness
Does politics impact happiness? This paper evaluates how being a political “winner” or “loser” – whether one’s preferred party controls government or not – is linked to multiple measures of life satisfaction. Using Gallup survey data on self-reported well-being for Democrats and for Republicans within the U.S. states for 2008-2016 (a time period when party control of government changed in several states) and a difference-in-difference model with two-way fixed effects, I find consistent evidence that citizens report lower levels of well-being when the opposing party controls state government. The substantive effect is particularly large for Democrats living in Republican controlled states. Conversely, there is little evidence that citizens’ well-being is boosted when their own party controls state government. These findings have important implications for our understanding about how partisan competition and election outcomes can impact subjective well-being and further highlight the significance of negative partisanship for American public opinion.
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An enduring puzzle in the study of American public opinion is what explains the decline in citizens’ trust in government since the late 1960s. We contribute to the study of trust by examining a factor that has received little attention to date: the adoption of public sector collective bargaining laws by U.S. states. We theorize that the widescale unionization of public employees is likely to negatively impact trust in government because it leads to a decline in political authority, accountability, and government responsiveness. Using American National Election Studies (ANES) data to measure citizens’ trust in government consistently over time, we leverage differences in the timing by which states adopted collective bargaining laws for public sector workers across a variety of occupations (state employees, local employees, teachers, police officers, and firefighters). We find consistent evidence that citizens report lower levels of trust in government after their state adopts public sector collective bargaining and this finding is robust to a variety of subsample analyses as well as timing and placebo checks. Notably, we also find a similar effect when assessing 1972-1976 ANES panel data, a timeframe when several states enacted these laws. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the decline in citizens’ trust in government as well as changing the focus of the literature on public sector unions that, to date, has emphasized economic impacts.