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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Examining the Role of Personal and Country-Level Freedom in Well-Being

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Book cover Measuring, Understanding and Improving Wellbeing Among Older People

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors present a much-needed quantitative study that examines the individual and interactive effects of individual freedom and national freedom on well-being among the elderly. The study analyzes cross-country data from World Values Survey and Freedom House. The result shows that personal freedom does not benefit well-being in a country that is not free. The authors demonstrate that it is possible to experience individual freedom in an unfree country, or conversely, to lack personal freedom in a free country. The authors further highlight the importance of ensuring the political and civil liberties of nations to promote happiness even if one has secured personal freedom.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The coding we use transposed the original coding in the WVS dataset where 1 means “very happy,” 2 means “quite happy,” 3 means “not very happy,” 4 means “not at all happy.”

  2. 2.

    The Freedom House rating scores for civil liberties and political rights are original coded from 1 to 7, where 1 equals most free and 7 equals least free. In our regressions, to allow for ease of interpretation, we transpose this such that 1 equals least free and 7 most free.

  3. 3.

    Given space constraints and the large number of variables, we limit this table to main variables of interest.

  4. 4.

    The results discussed in this section focus mostly on regression with the most complete specification, which include both individual-level and country-level factors (Column 2). Both OLS and ordered logit results are consistent. Thus, we focus on ordered logit regressions for interpretation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychological Science, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Sook Ning Chua

  2. School of Economics, Finance & Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Sefa Awaworyi Churchill

  3. Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Richard Koestner

Authors
  1. Sook Ning Chua
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  2. Sefa Awaworyi Churchill
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  3. Richard Koestner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sook Ning Chua .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Sefa Awaworyi Churchill

  2. School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Lisa Farrell

  3. School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Samuelson Appau

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Table 5 List of countries
Full size table
Table 6 Mean values of relevant explanatory variables against individual freedom mean scores
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Table 7 Standardized scores of personal and country freedom. Countries are arranged according to standardized scores of country, with countries on the right being more free than countries on the left on the Y-axis
Full size table
Table 8 Correlation matrix
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Chua, S.N., Awaworyi Churchill, S., Koestner, R. (2020). Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Examining the Role of Personal and Country-Level Freedom in Well-Being. In: Awaworyi Churchill, S., Farrell, L., Appau, S. (eds) Measuring, Understanding and Improving Wellbeing Among Older People. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2353-3_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2353-3_11

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-2352-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-2353-3

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