Life satisfaction across nations: The effects of women’s political status and public priorities Richard York a,⇑ , Shannon Elizabeth Bell b a Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1291, United States b Department of Sociology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, United States article info Article history: Received 6 December 2012 Revised 4 April 2014 Accepted 5 May 2014 Available online 15 May 2014 Keywords: Life satisfaction Women’s status Economic growth abstract Feminist scholars suggest that improving the quality of life of individuals living in nations around the world may be more readily achieved by increasing women’s political power and by reorienting public-policy priorities, than by focusing primarily on economic growth. These considerations raise the question of which characteristics of societies are associated with the quality of life of the people in those societies. Here, we address this issue empir- ically by statistically analyzing cross-national data. We assess the effects of gender equality in the political sphere, as well as a variety of other factors, on the subjective well-being of nations, as indicated by average self-reported levels of life satisfaction. We find that people report the highest levels of life satisfaction in nations where women have greater political representation, where military spending is low, and where health care spending is high, controlling for a variety of other factors. GDP per capita, urbanization, and natural resource exploitation are not clearly associated with life satisfaction. These findings suggest that nations may be able to improve the subjective quality of life of people without increasing material wealth or natural resource consumption by increasing gender equality in politics and changing public spending priorities. Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction What are the societal goals behind economic growth? Ostensibly, expansion of the economy is aimed at improving people’s lives. Measures of economic affluence, such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, are commonly used as indicators of quality of life of people in nations. However, the connection between GDP per capita and quality of life is not straightforward (Diener, Helliwell, and Kahneman, 2010). 1 In fact, some activists and scholars have argued that GDP is ‘‘utterly unrelated to the well-being of a community’’ (Waring quoted in Nash, 1995) because the levels of inequality, poverty, health, educational attainment, and environmental conditions in a nation are not reflected in the GDP (Waring, 1999). The recognition of the limitations of economic measures for gauging a nation’s living conditions and overall well-being has spread widely. Increasingly, scholars and activists are calling for a shift toward measuring societal well-being using indicators that assess not only people’s physical conditions, including their health, but also how people themselves evaluate their own http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.05.004 0049-089X/Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 541 346 5026. E-mail addresses: rfyork@uoregon.edu (R. York), shannon.eliz.bell@uky.edu (S.E. Bell). 1 The cited work is an edited volume, with chapters by various authors. Our reference is specifically to the general summary remarks made by the editors in the introduction based on their overall assessment of the various works in the volume, as well as the extensive literature on cross-national differences in well- being, but also more generally to the content of the volume, which has several chapters addressing various aspects of cross-national differences in subjective well-being. Social Science Research 48 (2014) 48–61 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Social Science Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssresearch