5.1 Life Satisfaction/happiness
As described above, we have reasons to expect that political participation will contribute to basic human psychological needs. As Frey and Stutzer write “[P]articipation and autonomy in decision-making provide procedural goods that serve innate needs of competence, autonomy and relatedness and thus contribute to individual well-being” (2005a: page 94, footnote 8). In this section, we will first compare the characteristics of different countries to see if there is an aggregate level relationship between political participation (or opportunities for participation) and average national happiness. Then we move to the level on which existing theories concentrate-the individual level-and use multivariate regression models to examine which individual characteristics may be correlated with happiness. We use multilevel regression models to incorporate information from both the individual and country levels in a single statistical model. Finally, we use two novel tactics in an attempt to better examine causality. We explore a quasi-experimental design using the fact that some survey respondents, based on their ages, were not differences between two groups of non-voters in a recent Costa Rican referendum: those who wanted to vote but could not and those who did not want to vote.