The paper was prepared by John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shawn Grover and Shun Wang in collaboration with Mario Marcel, Martin Forst and Tatyana Teplova. This paper has three main objectives. The first is to review existing studies of the links between good governance and subjective...

This chapter uses happiness data to assess the quality of government. Our happiness data are drawn from the Gallup World Poll, starting in 2005 and extending to 2017 or 2018. In our analysis of the panel of more than 150 countries and generally over 1,500 national-level observations, we show...

In this paper we employ World Values Survey measures of life satisfaction as though they were direct measures of utility, and use them to evaluate alternative features and forms of government in large international samples. We find that life satisfaction is more closely linked to several World...