In pursuit of happiness: Life satisfaction drives political support

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.     

MANAGERIAL CHALLENGES IN PUBLIC SERVICE CONTRACTING: LESSONS IN GREEN‐SPACE MANAGEMENT

In this article, we address a series of interrelated issues in the managerial challenge of public service contracting. This is done by prompting ten issues within four objectives and highlighting their relevance and potential interrelatedness in effective contract management. In contrast to prevalent piecemeal and theoretically one‐dimensional approaches, the objectives and issues constitute a holistic framework that advances a comprehensive and pragmatic understanding of contracting processes. We hope that the framework merits further in‐depth exploration that may generate new insights, themes and questions for research in public service contracting. We identify and exemplify the framework by combining insights from different theoretical perspectives with empirical evidence through an iterative process. The evidence is educed as a set of observed and self‐reported stories in a cross‐national sample of 15 cases of contracting‐out in urban green‐space management.     

Succession,power-sharing and the development of representative institutions in medieval Europe

Historians have documented that in medieval Europe, bargaining over the loyalty of lay magnates and high clergy was most intense during successions and that this often forced monarchs to give political concessions. We argue that matters related to succession predict short-term power-sharing concessions by rulers but that – because they do not permanently alter the balance of power between ruler and elite – they only trigger lasting changes of political institutions if these changes are in the mutual interest of the ruler and the elite groups. It follows that successions are unlikely to have long-term effects on representative institutions but that they may consolidate the rules regulating succession (the succession order). Using the natural deaths of monarchs as an instrument for successions, we confirm these claims with a new dataset that includes fine-grained data on succession and parliament-like assemblies in 16 European polities between 1000 and 1600. These findings shed new light on the development of representative institutions in medieval Europe, on the changes in succession orders that brought about clear rules about primogeniture and on the political leeway of legislatures in authoritarian regimes more generally.