Answer: people of conservative views, living in countries with large public social spending.
Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and his colleagues did a titanic job of analyzing survey data from a total of more than 1,1 million people conducted between 1970 and 2002. in 16 European countries. The array of respondents included representative samples of residents of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland, Great Britain, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Austria and Norway. All these people answered questions about their political views and about the “level of happiness” and personal satisfaction with life, and the researchers ranked countries according to the level of “liberalism” or “conservatism” of state social policy, and then compared one with the other.
Here it should be noted that the meaning of the term “liberal” in the USA, where the authors live, work and where they published their research in the Journal of Applied Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association, is opposite to the meaning in which this word is used in Europe and in Russia. By liberal views and liberal politics, Americans do not understand the protection of personal freedoms and the responsibility of people for their own lives, but, on the contrary, large social spending, in which assistance to the poor is provided through high taxes, and, in general, protectionism and guardianship of the state in relation to citizens. It is in this sense of the word that the authors classified Sweden and other Scandinavian countries among the most “liberal” countries, and Ireland, Portugal and France, for example, among the “conservative” ones.
It turned out the following. On the one hand, in general, the population of “liberal” countries, that is, countries with a pronounced socialist orientation, is happier and more satisfied with life than those who live in conservative countries; Denmark is the happiest country. But at the same time, in all countries, the holders of conservative views are happier than those who adhere to “liberal”, leftist convictions. From here – a simple logical conclusion: the happiest in Europe should be the Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian conservatives.
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Okulich-Kozarin explains this paradox: “Liberal” governments do more to protect people from hardships like unemployment and poverty, which makes people generally happier. On the other hand, conservatives are more satisfied with life than liberals, because it is easier for them to accept and rationalize the status quo and, in particular, to believe that economic troubles are the result of personal shortcomings.
In other words, right-wing conservatives, believing that in this life we get more or less what we deserve (which is why excessive social benefits are harmful), live in harmony with the world. And the left “liberals” constantly suffer from a keen sense of the injustice of the universe.
However, what has been said does not pretend to be an exhaustive formula of happiness, which, of course, is much more complicated, and applies only to Europeans. Despite all the differences, the countries for which the comparison was made have a lot in common, and all of them, as a group, are strikingly different from other regions of the world, so mechanically extrapolate what is true for the Danes and the French to the inhabitants of, for example, Argentina, Russia or the United Arab Emirates, is not possible. The latest World Happiness Report**, published annually by the UN, ranks all countries in terms of happiness. If the composition of the top five is quite predictable (Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden), then there are already many unexpected things in the top 20: in particular, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela and Mexico were there.
Russia occupies 68th place, behind Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan among the former USSR countries.
* «Liberal Countries Have More Satisfied Citizens While Conservatives Are Happier Individual», Journal of Applied Psychology, сентябрь 2014.
** World Happiness Report 2013.