What are the happiest authoritarian nations?
And how do they compare to the saddest democracies?
As an expat who settled abroad, I love connecting with other expats on why they moved and why they settled where they did.
And as I continue to travel and learn more about how other countries function, I find myself more and more fascinated with the endless variations of government and ways of life that exist throughout the world.
Speculating about other countries’ happiness and levels of democracy can be a sensitive topic that can quickly turn into an emotionally-charged discussion, filled with prejudices and biases.
So, as a Data Analyst, I wanted to explore what the data says. Not to judge, but to examine. The first datasets I wanted to explore were happiness, democracy, and income inequality.
And as my investigation continued, taking regime type into consideration added a new layer that may offer some clues as to where even the highest levels of democracy is failing its citizens.
Process
I found data for each of these metrics, democracy, happiness, and income inequality. Each of the links can provide a bit more information about each of the datasets.
I find it important to express that happiness is very relative based on a number of factors. The dataset we are using scores happiness based on real GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption.
The calculation of democracy considered the electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.
The data that overlapped between the 3 datasets was from 2015–2021 so that was used in the analysis. The regime type was only included for the year 2021. Each dataset required its own cleaning/processing to prepare it for analysis.
For more details on how the data was cleaned/prepared, please see my portfolio here.
Analysis
My first idea to explore was how democracy related with happiness. This first chart is a scatter plot relating democracy and happiness, with income inequality increasing as the size of the points increases (the points that appear as dots to not have data for income inequality). Some country names are included for reference. The data points represent the average democracy/happiness scores for the years 2015–2021.
This graph shows there seems to be a relationship between happiness and democracy, but not necessarily a strong one. There generally appears to be less income inequality near the highest-scoring democracies.
Next, I wanted to see if there was a similar relationship on the country level. Examining the level of democracy and happiness over time per country gave varying results.
Here are a few countries where there is a strong relationship between democracy and happiness.
These are just a few examples of the countries in which there seems to be a positive relationship between democracy and happiness. We can see that as one goes down, so does the other.
Let’s take a look at a few other examples.
Here are a few countries in which there seems to be a strong negative relationship between democracy and happiness. In these examples, democracy goes down quite sharply, while happiness increases in each of these countries. While Nicaragua’s happiness did not increase sharply, it was mentioned due to a lack of response in happiness while the democratic score dropped sharply.
So what does that say about these different countries? That some welcome the strong hand of a dictator while others do not? Perhaps the “democracy” they were replacing did not suit the needs of the country’s citizens.
A quick snapshot of some of the happiness metrics during those years shows that there was no one answer for why countries became happier as their level of democracy decreased. Most had increases in their economy, some in freedom, and some in perceptions of corruption (for this metric, a higher value means less corruption).
At this point, I wanted to continue my analysis into how, where, and potentially why democracy and happiness were related, because clearly in some places in the world they did not have a similar relationship.
After a brief search through the democracy index data, I found that each country was classified as one of four types: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian. The following table gives the breakdown of how each category was determined.
First, let’s take a look at a high-level comparison of the happiness of the various regime types to get an idea of their ranges and how they relate to each other. Each column represents a different country.
An average line is included for each regime type. What immediately stands out to me is the range that each regime type has, on all levels. The “saddest” democracies have happiness scores that are lower than those of the happiest authoritarian nations.
Now might be a good time to explicitly state that I am in no way empowering or condoning authoritarian regimes in any way, this is simply the data speaking. Take it how you will.
Let’s take a look at the ranges that most catch my interest… the “saddest” democracies and the happiest authoritarian regimes.
We can see that the average happiness of the happiest authoritarian countries is higher than those of the saddest full democracies.
Breaking down this happiness data further, I found a few interesting metrics that help explain this score.
This result came as a bit of a surprise to me, seeing the happiest authoritarian nations scoring as more generous than the saddest democracies.
In this case generosity is the residual of regressing the national average of poll responses to the question, Have you donated money to a charity in the past month? on GDP per capita.
Which basically means, that they look at how rich a country is, see how that affects giving to charity, and whatever’s left that isn’t due to wealth, is considered generosity.
This one could be misleading, because in this case, a higher value means less corruption.
I would expect perceptions of corruption to be significantly lower in full democracies. Something about the people having the power to vote for non-corrupt officials, or authoritarians being more likely to engage in shady business practices, but here we are.
And perhaps the most puzzling finding from this happiness investigation; the fact that the happiest authoritarian nations ALL score higher on freedom to make life choices than the saddest democracies.
According to the report, “the freedom to make life choices is the national average of binary responses to the Gallup World Poll question, Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”
It may be important to note that the question is not How free are you? as opposed to How satisfied are you with your freedoms?
Considering the different standard in human rights in many authoritarian countries, the fact that these scores are still higher than the saddest democracies really speaks volumes.
I hope you learned something new or uncovered a bias that you didn’t know you had while looking at this analysis. At the very least, made you think.
This analysis could certainly improve with some feedback, so if you have something to say, please tell us your thoughts and where you’re from. We’d love to hear from you.
