WHO IS HAPPY IN POST-SOCIALIST SLOVENIA?: POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND THE DYNAMIC OF THE “HAPPINESS GAP”

• Authors: Malnar Brina , Kurdija Slavko , Bernik Ivan
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The article starts from the premise that the legitimacy of the post-socialist order is strongly related to its ability to generate a level of happiness among the lower social strata that is not significantly lower than the happiness enjoyed by the privileged social strata. We used three waves of the Slovenian Public Opinion Survey and seven waves of the European Social Survey to explore the hypothesis that the average level of happiness in Slovenia is higher in the post-socialist period than during the socialist period, due to Slovenia’s relative prosperity and new democratic circumstances. World-wide happiness analyses by Inglehart et al. (2008) also addressed the link between levels of life satisfaction and system legitimacy. The authors conclude that society’s level of well-being is intimately related to the legitimacy of the socioeconomic and political system. In addition to examining the general trend, we set out to explore the social distribution of happiness over time, i.e. the happiness (trend) distinguished by two basic social strata. In light of the transition effect, we explored another explanatory factor; namely optimism. In times of rapid social change an important mediating factor for personal happiness is likely to be the perception of future opportunities. Our analysis confirmed that optimism plays an important role in the subjective self-assessments of happiness. With the exception of health, optimism is the strongest predictor of happiness, which suggests that an optimistic outlook does have the potential to compensate for the current lack of material standards among the ‘losers’ of transition. However, during the period of economic recession which began to affect Slovenia in 2009, the gap has shown a peculiar dynamic. Moreover, even with the recent recovery of economic growth and the cessation of the austerity measures law, some of their elements remain in place and they are precisely those that target primarily the middle class.

Keywords

EN

HAPPINESS; WELL-BEING; TRANSITION; OPTIMISM; INEQUALITY; SLOVENIA

• Publisher: Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Social Sciences
• Journal: Človek a spoločnosť. Internetový časopis pre pôvodné teoretické a výskumné štúdie z oblasti spoločenských vied
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 4
• Pages: -

Contributors

author

Malnar Brina

• Public Opinion and Mass Communication Research Centre at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

author

Kurdija Slavko

author

Bernik Ivan