WASHINGTON — Now the good news for Republicans: You are happier than Democrats. You always have been, and you probably always will be.
The pollsters were in the field asking about happiness this month, a period when economic news was gloomy for everybody and presidential campaign news seemed especially baleful for Republicans. Yet they found 37 percent of Republicans are “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats; 51 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats are “pretty happy”; and 9 percent of Republicans are “not too happy,” compared with 20 percent of Democrats.
The survey results were published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
The partisan happiness gap — unbroken for nearly four decades — is impervious to electoral ups and downs. Government-funded researchers identified the happiness gap in 1972. Since then, the Democrats have been comparatively more bummed out not just during the tenures of GOP presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush. They were noticeably less joyful than Republicans even during the GOP fiasco of Watergate, and during the Democratic Carter and Clinton administrations.
This year, when things seem rosy for Democrats, the joy gulch yawns wider than ever. The fraction of very happy Republicans has never been so much larger than the very happy Democrats.
What’s the Republicans’ secret to feeling groovy?
“They have more money,” Paul Taylor, director of the Pew Social &Demographic Trends project, writes in the new report. “They have more friends. They are more religious. They are healthier. They are more likely to be married. They like their communities better. They like their jobs more. They are more satisfied with their family life. They like the weather better.”
None of this proves being Republican causes happiness, Taylor cautions. Do happy people get married, attend weekly religious services and vote for John McCain? Or does devotion to marriage, God and McCain cause them to be happy?
The study does identify a series of characteristics found in many people who call themselves happy. Good health is a key factor. Marriage and religion are big, too, and so is wealth.
When you control for all the other variables, Taylor says, a Republican is 13 percent or 7 percent more likely to be very happy than a Democrat, depending on which regression analysis model you use.
It turns out the happiness gap is not just an American phenomenon. In country after country, happiness studies find that “conservatives” are happier than “liberals.” They seem to be two species, with differently encoded DNA.
“The question is not whether Republicans are happier than Democrats, or conservatives are happier than liberals,” says Arthur Brooks, the incoming president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America — and How We Can Get More of It.” “That’s unambiguously true. The question is, why?”
Brooks says a lot hinges on the answer to this question: Do you believe that hard work and perseverance can overcome disadvantages? Conservatives are more likely to say yes.
Pew found that Democrats are more likely to say that success in life is mostly determined by outside forces. Republicans lean toward thinking that success is determined by one’s own efforts.
The hypothesis: Those who think they can control their destinies are happier.
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