Roberto Foa

Development, Freedom, and Rising Happiness: A Global Perspective (1981–2007):

Until recently, it was widely held that happiness fluctuates around set points, so that neither individuals nor societies can lastingly increase their happiness. Even though recent research showed that some individuals move enduringly above or below their set points, this does not refute the idea that the happiness levels of entire societies remain fixed. Our article, however, challenges this idea: Data from representative national surveys carried out from 1981 to 2007 show that happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries for which substantial time-series data were available. Regression analyses suggest that that the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness. Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and increasing social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world, as the human development model suggests.

The Democratic Disconnect

Abstract: The citizens of wealthy, established democracies are less satisfied with their governments than they have been at any time since opinion polling began. Most scholars have interpreted this as a sign of dissatisfaction with particular governments rather than with the political system as a whole. Drawing on recent public opinion data, we suggest that this optimistic interpretation is no longer plausible. Across a wide sample of countries in North America and Western Europe, citizens of mature democracies have become markedly less satisfied with their form of government and surprisingly open to nondemocratic alternatives. A serious democratic disconnect has emerged. If it widens even further, it may begin to challenge the stability of seemingly consolidated democracies.

The Last Mile in Analyzing Wellbeing and Poverty : Indices of Social Development

Development practitioners worldwide increasingly recognize the importance of informal institutions—such as norms of cooperation, non-discrimination, or the role of community oversight in the management of investment activities—in affecting well-being, poverty, and even economic growth. There has been little empirical analysis that tests these relationships at the international level. This is largely due to data limitations: few reliable, globally representative data sources exist that can provide a basis for cross-country comparison of social norms and practice, social trust, and community engagement. The International Institute of Social Studies now hosts a large database of social development indicators compiled from a wide range of sources in a first attempt to overcome such data constraints, at a low cost (http://www.IndSocDev.org). The Indices of Social Development are based on over 200 measures from 25 reputable data sources for the years 1990 to 2010.These measures are aggregated into six composite indices: civic activism, interpersonal safety and trust, inter-group cohesion, clubs and associations, gender equality, and inclusion of minorities. Not all data sources provide observations for indicators in each country, but together these data sources allow for comprehensive estimates of social behavior and norms of interaction across a broad range of societies, and increasingly with possibilities to track changes over time. This paper presents the database, highlights the differences, similarities, and complementarities with other measures of well-being, including those around income poverty, multidimensional poverty, and human development.

Social Capital and Cross-Country Environmental Performance

Previous empirical work on the effects of social capital on measures of environmental performance across countries has been limited by data on social capital only being available for a relatively small number of countries. This article makes use of a new data set measuring different dimensions of social capital for a much larger number of countries to analyze the relationship between social capital and the environment across countries. There is evidence that some aspects of social capital are associated with better environmental performance.

The weakness of postcommunist civil society reassessed

During the last two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have argued that civil society is structurally deficient in postcommunist countries. Yet why have the seemingly strong, active and mobilised civic movements of the transition period become so weak after democracy was established? And why have there been diverging political trajectories across the postcommunist space if civil society structures were universally weak? This article uses a new, broader range of data to show that civil societies in Central and Eastern European countries are not as feeble as commonly assumed. Many postcommunist countries possess vigorous public spheres and active civil society organisations strongly connected to transnational civic networks able to shape domestic policies. In a series of time-series cross-section models, the article shows that broader measures of civic and social institutions are able to predict the diverging transition paths among postcommunist regimes, and in particular the growing gap between democratic East Central Europe and the increasingly authoritarian post-Soviet space.

Persistence or Reversal of Fortune? Early State Inheritance and the Legacies of Colonial Rule*

This article assesses the relative merits of the “reversal of fortune” thesis, according to which the most politically and economically advanced polities of the precolonial era were subject to institutional reversal by European colonial powers, and the “persistence of fortune” view, according to which early advantages in state formation persisted throughout and beyond the colonial era. Discussing the respective arguments, the article offers a synthesis: the effect of early state formation on development trajectories was subject to a threshold condition. Non-European states at the highest levels of precolonial political centralization were able to resist European encroachment and engage in defensive modernization, whereas states closest to, yet just below, this threshold were the most attractive targets for colonial exploitation. Since the onset of decolonization, however, such polities have been among the first to regain independence and world patterns of state capacity are increasingly reverting to those of the precolonial era.