The happiness gap

 Conservatives typically report being happier than liberals do, but the size of the gap appears to change over time.    In 2015, I looked at data from the GSS  and found that the "happiness gap" became larger during the GW Bush presidency, but fell in the Obama presidency.  A few days ago, Ross Douthat had a column called "Can the Left be Happy," which said that "the left-right happiness gap is wider than before"--that is, the relative happiness of the left has declined in the last decade or so.   He made a plausible case but didn't offer any systematic data, so I'll take another look.

The GSS asks people to rate their political ideology on a seven point scale, from very liberal to very conservative, which I collapsed into three groups:  extremely liberal or liberal; slightly liberal, moderate, or slightly conservative; conservative or extremely conservative.  The liberal and conservative groups are both about 15-20% of the sample.  

The figure is hard to interpret, partly because of sampling error in individual years and partly because of the big drop among all groups in 2021 and 2022, so here's a figure showing the difference between the averages for liberals and conservatives (positive numbers mean conservatives report being happier than liberals do):

The higher reference line is the average difference.  The gap was larger than average in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008, and then fell in 2010 (liberals were actually happier than conservatives).  It's generally remained smaller than average since then.  

Here's the corresponding figure for the moderate/conservative gap:

A similar story:  the gap became a lot smaller in 2010, and has generally remained below average since then.  

So it's not liberals who have become relatively unhappier in recent years, but conservatives.  Going back to the original figure, there was little or no happiness gap in the 1970s.  Conservatives pulled ahead in the 1980s, and the size of the gap seemed to be gradually increasing until 2008.  Then conservatives became less happy in 2010, and the gap has been smaller since then.  

You could say that the shifts in the 21st century are just another example of increasing political polarization:  liberals are relatively happy when a Democrat is in office, and conservatives are relatively happy when a Republican is.  But I don't think that fits the pattern very well.  Although there were signs of growing polarization under Bush, they were pretty small--you didn't get a big increase until the Obama years.  And although conservatives became relatively happier in 2018, the change was not that big, and the gap remained smaller than it had been under Bush. 

But considering the whole period suggests that there may be a connection to the general political and social climate.  In the 1970s, the tide seemed to be running to the left, but with the tax revolt of the late 1970s and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, things seemed to stabilize and maybe even reverse.  Before the 2008 election, conservatives could feel pretty good--Republicans had won five of the last seven presidential elections, and no Democrat had received a majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter got 50.1% in 1976.  Republicans had also gained parity in Congress, and the courts had moved to the right.  Then Obama was elected with a lot of popular enthusiasm, a solid Congressional majority, and an economic crisis that provided a rationale for vigorous government action.  Prominent conservatives reacted to the threat by a strategy of scorched-earth opposition--e. g. they denounced Obamacare not just as ineffective and expensive, but as the end of the American way of life.  Since then, conservatives have felt like they are on the defensive, even when Trump was president--fighting against the deep state, the media, Big Tech, etc.  So my idea is that although ratings of happiness are primarily affected by individual factors, there is some spillover from feelings about the general direction of society.