European Journal of Political Research  :  –  , 2019 1 doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12335 In pursuit of happiness: Life satisfaction drives political support PETER ESAIASSON, 1 STEFAN DAHLBERG 1,2 & ANDREJ KOKKONEN 1 1 Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; 2 Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Norway Abstract. It is argued in this article that citizens in democracies use their subjective well-being (SWB) as an evaluative criterion when deciding how willing they are to support and comply with government dictates (political system support). When life is satisfactory, government authorities are rewarded with support, when it is not, citizens punish authorities by withholding their support. To make sense of the relationship, it is suggested that citizens act as if they have signed a happiness contract with ‘those in power’.In support of this argument, comparative survey data shows that SWB predicts attitudes on political system support across country contexts and under strong control conditions. Establishing that the relationship is causal, panel data documents that attitudes on political system support can be undermined following the termination of a close personal relationship, and that the causal effect is mediated via changes in SWB. Finally, as predicted, the happiness-support relationship is weaker among individuals who are high on spirituality/religiousness and attribute blame for external events to both worldly and non-worldly powers. Keywords: subjective well-being; happiness; political support; psychological contracts; life events Introduction Political scientists are increasingly targeting citizens’ happiness when evaluating political systems. Scholars in the feld view the subjective well-being of citizens as complementary to objective measures of welfare and strive to identify political factors that positively affect citizens’ happiness (e.g., Helliwell & Huang 2008; Helliwell et al. 2014; Ott 2011; Rode et al. 2013). An important fnding in this literature is that the quality of government institutions impacts the level of citizen happiness in a country (e.g., Hudson 2006; Helliwell & Huang 2008; Ott 2011; Rode et al. 2013). This article focuses on the relationship between citizens’ happiness and the functionality of government, but with a reversed order of causality. Looking at happiness as a cause rather than an outcome, we explore the extent to which happy citizens are more willing than others to not only vote for incumbent politicians (Liberini et al. 2017), but also to support and comply with government dictates. The idea that individuals’ feelings of subjective well-being (SWB) are causally linked to voluntary compliance and other expressions of political system support has been raised before. 1 In political system support research, SWB features as a control variable (e.g., Kornberg & Clarke 1992; Kumlin 2004: 136; Zmerli & Newton 2008), as a component in the social success and well-being theory (Choi & Woo 2016) and as an indicator of perceived policy performance (Norris 2011a). In happiness research, country-level SWB predicts country-level political trust (Veenhoven 2009); individual-level SWB predicts democratic satisfaction (Hooghe 2012); and individual-level SWB modifes the negative impact of perceived corruption on political participation (Zheng et al. 2017). However, SWB occupies C  2019 European Consortium for Political Research