Subjective wellbeing and the national pride of Russians: causal analysis

Abstract

Happiness in Russia recovered rapidly along with economic growth between 1999–2008 after a sharp decline in the 1990s. Surprisingly, however, the economic stagnation that followed did not prevent further growth in happiness levels, which reached a historic peak by the end of 2017. Using data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study for the period 1999-2017, we have previously showed that 1) national pride, which began to rise in the 2000s, is strongly correlated with happiness; 2) national pride, as opposed to material well-being, became an increasingly important predictor of happiness after 2008, especially for the poorer segments of the population; and 3) instrumental variables tests suggest that it is national pride that drives the long-term increase in happiness, rather than the other way around. However, a definitive judgment on the direction of causality requires a longitudinal data. After 2017, Russia experienced difficulties associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine. This article clarifies the nature of the correlation between national pride and happiness in this complicated context. We apply the method of seemingly unrelated regression equations to three waves of panel data collected in 2019-2022. The results of our study indicate that there is a statistically significant stable relationship between national pride and happiness and that it is an increase in the level of subjective well-being that is leading to a higher level of national pride and not vice versa. We conclude that subjective well-being has a positive impact on the national pride of Russians. However, when interpreting these results, one should be cautious and consider that the crisis context of data collection could have affected the direction of the relationship between the variables: in the absence of tension in the socio-economic structure of society, this relationship could have the opposite direction.