Posted March 17, 2017 15:44:37

Photo: Australia came in tenth in terms of democracy and ninth in happiness. (Stocksnap: Daniel Bowman)

Many people think that democracy is the right system in terms of being fairer and delivering the best outcomes for people, but does it actually make us happier?

Dr Matthew Beard, an ethicist and moral philosopher from the Ethics Centre, has looked closely at the issue by correlating three indexes on happiness, wellbeing and democracy.

Dr Beard used the Economists Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index report, published in 2016, which ranked different nations based on how democratic they were.

The index scored each country based on their electoral process, how well the government functioned, the level of political participation, political culture, and people's civil liberties.

Dr Beard said that nine of the countries in the Economists report which scored in the top 10 on level of democratic values, also scored well on levels of wellbeing (as defined by the OECD) and levels of happiness (as defined by the World Happiness report).

"So you've got these nine countries sitting really, really high up across three fairly influential studies," he said.

And yes, Australia was one of those nine countries.

"But we bounce up and down depending on which one," Dr Beard said.

Australia came in tenth in terms of democracy, second in quality of life, ninth in terms of happiness.

"So overall if you were comparing places where you could have been born, Australia would be right up there," he said.

Dr Beard said while more research was needed, it seemed that society played a large role in a person's ability to achieve happiness in life.

And he said there was an aggregation of particular nations who scored high in all of the different measures, which suggested that a person's ability to live a happy life was beyond their own control, and was largely influenced by where they were born.

"And that's something a lot of people have been calling attention to for a while, but just looking at the numbers here suggests that it's something that we can't put to the back of our minds."

Does money make you happy?

Dr Beard said while on an individual level he would lean towards the saying "money makes it easier to be happy", when applied more widely it did not quite match up.

"When I looked at the relationship between wellbeing, happiness and democracy, I thought, well, the obvious thing to look at here is, it actually any of these things — or is it just that all these nations are really wealthy?"

Dr Beard examined the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the top-scoring countries, in terms of both raw GDP and GDP per capita.

"Some of the countries feature. So Canada features in democracy, happiness, quality of life and is in the top 10 for GDP," he said.

"Norway, Denmark and Iceland are all quite high in GDP per capita. But a lot of the other countries don't feature."

Australia appears in the top 10 list of democracy, happiness and quality of life is Australia — but it is nowhere to be seen in the top 10 GDP list.

And then there is China, which scores high in terms of GDP, but does not feature in the top 10 of democracy, happiness or quality of life.

"So there is less correlation between wellbeing and GDP, between happiness and GDP, between democracy and GDP," Dr Beard said.

"So it might not be the case that money makes us happy."

How important is democracy?

Dr Beard said last year, for the first time, the Economist demoted the United States from a full democracy to what it called a "flawed democracy".

That meant it fell from 8.05 in 2015 to 7.98 in 2016, not a huge drop but enough to slip just below the 8.00 threshold ascribed to a "full democracy".

He said this was due to the Economist finding enough evidence to question the way the election transpired.

"Not just in terms of Trump or Trump voters or Clinton or Clinton voters — but also in terms of some of the allegations about foreign governments involved in that election," Dr Beard said.

"That meant that they weren't as confident to the extent the US were holding on to some of those democratic ideals."

He said in terms of the rise of populism — as seen in Europe and the United States — the world could not look to any political system as the "silver bullet", and assume that as long as a country was democratic everything would be better.

"Historically we've seen a lot of times when we've tried to introduce democracy into a nation and think that that will fix the problem, and it hasn't," he said.

"Because political societies are complicated and the way you structure them is really important, but it's never going to be a single-factor solution to some of these problems around happiness, ethics and wellbeing."

Topics: happiness, emotions, community-and-society, government-and-politics, globalisation---economy, business-economics-and-finance, australia