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Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

2008· article· en· 590 citations· W2105073095 on OpenAlex· 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02124.x

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A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian funderA Canadian agency funded it. The work may carry no Canadian affiliation at all.

No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Opus teacher head0.092
GPT teacher head0.384
Teacher spread
0.291 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

In this research, we drew on system-justification theory and the notion that conservative ideology serves a palliative function to explain why conservatives are happier than liberals. Specifically, in three studies using nationally representative data from the United States and nine additional countries, we found that right-wing (vs. left-wing) orientation is indeed associated with greater subjective well-being and that the relation between political orientation and subjective well-being is mediated by the rationalization of inequality. In our third study, we found that increasing economic inequality (as measured by the Gini index) from 1974 to 2004 has exacerbated the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, apparently because conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer against the negative hedonic effects of economic inequality.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
Psychological Science
Topic
Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction
Field
Psychology
Canadian institutions
Funders
Institute of Population and Public Health
Keywords
HappinessIdeologyPsychologyPoliticsSocial psychologyRationalization (economics)ConservatismInequalityBiology and political orientationSystem justificationEconomic inequalitySubjective well-beingPositive economicsEconomicsLawPolitical science
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes