Maintaining a downward trend, India slipped to the 140th position, seven spots down from last year, in a happiness ranking of 156 countries this year, according to a new report which is unlikely to cheer up the ruling coalition in the run-up to the general elections.
World happiness has fallen in recent years, driven by thesustained downward trend in India, said the World Happiness Report, released onWednesday in conjunction with the United Nations’ International Day ofHappiness.
As for emotions, there has been a widespread upward trendrecently in negative effect, comprising worry, sadness and anger, especiallymarked in Asia and Africa, it added.
Does happiness affect voting behaviour? A special chapter inthe World Happiness Report 2019, produced by the Sustainable DevelopmentSolutions Network, a UN initiative, explored the relation between the two.
The research showed national average life satisfaction issignificantly related to the vote share subsequently received by parties that gointo the election as part of the governing coalition.
“There is a clear and significant positive relationshipbetween national life satisfaction in the run-up to general elections and thesubsequent electoral success of governing parties,” the report said.
A one standard deviation increase in national lifesatisfaction is associated with nearly an eight percentage-point increase invote share, the findings showed.
This year’s happiness report focuses on happiness and thecommunity — how happiness has evolved over the past dozen years — with focuson the technologies, social norms, conflicts and government policies that havedriven those changes.
Special chapters focus on generosity and pro-socialbehaviour, the effects of happiness on voting behaviour, big data, and thehappiness effects of Internet use and addictions.
As in 2018, Finland took the top spot as the happiestcountry in the world, according to three years of surveys taken by Gallup from2016-2018.
Rounding out the rest of the top 10 are countries that haveconsistently ranked among the happiest. They are in that order — Denmark,Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada andAustria.
The US ranked 19th, dropping one spot from last year.
The report, which is in its seventh edition, ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be, according to their evaluations of their own lives.