Authors

Paulina Lenik¹;  ¹ Kozminski University Warsaw, Poland

Discussion

The objective of this investigation is to firstly identify the disparity in self-reported subjective well-being (SWB) between Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the West, and secondly, to examine the factors that contribute to its existence. Theoretically, it is reasonable to assume that individuals who possess higher wealth would exhibit a higher level of happiness compared to those who reside at the bottom end of the income scale, as stated by Blanchower (2008). Furthermore, we could also state that a rise in the aggregate financial resources of a nation enhances the availability of economic and social advantages. In simple terms, a poorer individual living in a wealthier country is better off than a poor individual living in a relatively poor country. Nonetheless, as argued in this paper, these are multifaceted aspects that exhibit a certain degree of regional specificity, necessitating a further empirical examination. It remains reasonable to assume that every individual strives to enhance their socio-economic footing. Then SWB is important to policymakers, at least in two ways. For one, in liberal democracies, individuals are important. If a government is not in alignment with the demands of the populace, it may lose its mandate in the forthcoming elections. Secondly, democracies are concerned with the provision of public goods, such as health care or education services, which have a significant impact on individuals' life choices. In the European context, that may have a tremendous impact on electoral behaviour (Swank & Betz, 2003; Jakobsson & Kumlin, 2017) and migration patterns (Giulietti et al., 2017). Therefore, one may inquire the subsequent inquiries: Is there a gap between the subjective-well being in the CEE and the West? If such a gap exists, what are its attributes? Do these attributes influence the left-right electoral preference? Answering the above requires a cross-country data sample that allows for a regional comparison. This dataset should be on an individual level, since we are dealing with latent constructs (perceptions and feelings).  The selected data, the European Social Survey (ESS) provides a desirable time-dimension (spanning the years 2002-2020) for all EU nations, which meets the study objectives and permits progress without the need for resource-intensive primary-data collection. To see if there is a regional gap, I will start with a two-tail test of means (per region) and then use Oaxaca-Blinder (OB) decomposition to confirm these initial findings. The OB allows us to examine the proportion of variance explained by the given vector of group characteristics and the proportion of variance due to unknown predictors (Jann, 2008).  As proposed by Rios-Avila (2020), the second part of the study would include an unconditional quantile regression (UQR) extending the OB decomposition.