Marketing Happiness in Politics: Strange Bedfellows, but a Winning Presidential Election Framework?
Research on happiness has become prevalent in academic literature spanning across psychology, sociology, healthcare, marketing, economics, and political science. See for example Cook and Chater (2010), Crossley and Langdridge (2005), Frey and Stutzer (200
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hed especially important for lower-income respondents explaining why the negative association between income inequality and happiness held for lower-income respondents, but not for higher-income respondents. These findings need to be considered against the backdrop of Americans being more accepting of income inequality than Europeans because they perceive upward mobility easier than Europeans (Frey and Stutzer 2002). To increase income equality and thereby happiness, the Obama campaign advocated an economic plan that would close the income gap by mandating the rich to pay higher taxes. President Obama stated how “countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run” (Lane 2011, p.2). He presented his proposed tax plan as enabling critical investments in education and training, which were projected to create future economic growth and equality (Lane 2011; Sahadi 2012). By investing in education and training, President Obama asserted greater equality and social mobility for Americans (Lane 2011). Gropper, Lawson & Thorne (2011) found a positive relationship between economic freedom and national levels of happiness. Such positive influences of economic freedom on happiness are magnified by an increase of GDP per capita. They also found that freer people generally are wealthier, live longer and are happier. Greater economic freedom is usually associated with capitalism, and the Pew Research Center (2011, p.1) found in a national sample of 1,521 adults that 50% of respondents hold a positive view and 40% held a negative view of capitalism. The term socialism (generally associated with less economic freedom) was regarded as negative by 60% of respondents while only 31% regarded it positively (Pew Research Center 2011, p.1). Analyzing the views of ethnic, age, party, and ideology groups on these issues revealed more acute differences. While more White respondents regarded capitalism positive than socialism (55% to 24%), Black (55% to 41%) and Hispanic (44% to 32%) respondents showed the inverse with more positive feelings towards socialism than towards capitalism (Pew Research Center 2011, p.3). All age groups 30 and older (although with diminishing support among younger groups) regarded capitalism more positive than socialism, but respondents aged 18 – 29 years of age regarded socialism more positive than capitalism (49% to 46%) (Pew Research Center 2011, p.3). All flavors of Republican as well as Independent respondents overwhelmingly held more positive views of capitalism than socialism, while conservative/moderate democrats only indicated a marginal difference in favor of capitalism (42% to 37%). Liberal democrats, however, regarded socialism more positive than capitalism (59% to 46%) (Pew Research Center 2011, p.3). COLLECTIVISTIC DIMENSIONS OF HAPPINESS Collectivistic behaviors are common in business settings where teamwork concepts, group harmony, and relationships are highly desired to produce positive outcomes. Conjoined with psychological constructs that influences ha
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