The World Is a Little Happier on the Right

When an American essayist points out that conservatives report being happier than liberals, it is tempting to file it under U.S. culture war — a story about church, marriage, and Fox News. But the same gap shows up almost everywhere social scientists have looked. Pooling four decades of the European and World Values Surveys, which ask people in nearly a hundred countries to place themselves from left to right and to rate their life from 0 to 10, the pattern is close to a law: in 89 of 99 countries, the right reports higher life satisfaction than the left.

The gap is not large — about 0.43 points on the 0–10 scale, on average — but it is strikingly consistent. Sort the world’s people into left, centre and right, weight every country equally, and life satisfaction climbs from 6.53 on the left to 6.64 in the centre to 6.97 on the right. Ten countries reverse it, mostly by a hair. Almost none reverse it by much.

The advantage is not concentrated in the rich democracies where the question was born. Broken out by region, it is positive in every one. In sub-Saharan Africa it holds in all 12 countries surveyed; in Europe and Central Asia, in 40 of 41. The largest gaps are in the post-communist world — Ukraine, Estonia, Russia, Moldova, Latvia all show a right advantage above a full point — where the “left” still carries the memory of the old regime. The smallest are in the Middle East and Latin America.

A gradient, not a club of two

Splitting people into “left” and “right” hides how smooth the relationship is. Walk the full 1-to-10 self-placement scale and average across countries, and life satisfaction rises step by step — from about 6.5 in the centre-left to 7.16 at the far right. The very far left ticks up slightly above the moderate left, the one wrinkle in an otherwise steady climb. This is the shape of a real gradient, not an artifact of where you draw the line.

What this shows — and what it doesn’t

This is a correlation, repeated almost everywhere — not a prescription. It cannot tell you that moving rightward would make anyone happier, nor that the gap means the same thing in Sweden and in Zambia. “Left” and “right” are self-placements that travel poorly across borders: in the post-communist countries with the widest gaps, the left is bound up with a discredited regime, which is part of why the gap there is so large. The measure is evaluative — a considered rating of one’s life — and a separate question is whether the same people also feel better day to day; this survey can’t say, because it has no daily-mood items.

What survives all those cautions is the sheer regularity. Whatever it is about placing oneself on the right — or about the things that lead people there — it travels with a small, stubborn increment of life satisfaction across four decades and nearly a hundred societies. A companion piece looks at the same gradient inside Europe alone; here the point is its reach. The interesting argument is no longer whether the gap is real. It is what to make of how universal it is.