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• ISQOLS WEBINAR: "Bowling with Trump: Economic Anxiety, Racial Identification, and Well-Being in the 2016 US Presidential Election"

  • When
    30 Sep 2020
  •  
    8:00 AM (PDT)
  • Location
    Online Webinar

  Register

  ISQOLS WEBINAR

  "Bowling with Trump: Economic Anxiety, Racial Identification, and Well-Being in the 2016 US Presidential Election "

  
  

  WEDNESDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER

  8:00am PT/

  11:00am EDT

   4:00pm/16:00 GMT

  
  

  ****

  FREE 

  We use well-being data from the Gallup Daily Poll and a measure of racial animus derived from Google search data to explain why racial identification became politically salient in the 2016 Presidential Election. We find that the oft-observed positive relationship between racial animus and Trump’s vote share is eliminated by introducing an interaction between racial animus and a measure of the basic psychological need for relatedness. We also find that rates of worry have a strong and significant positive association with Trump’s vote share, but this is offset by high levels of relatedness. Together, these two results imply that racial voting behavior in 2016 was driven by a desire for in-group affiliation as a way of buffering against economic and cultural anxiety. Such behavior is well established in laboratory studies in self-determination theory and worldview defense theory. We find no effect on Trump’s performance from exposure to trade shocks. This suggests that the economic roots of Trump’s success may be overstated and that the need for relatedness is a key underlying driver of contemporary political trends in the US.

  
  

  Presented by:  Dr. Mark Fabian

  Mark Fabian is a Research Associate (Postdoc) at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge. He was previously a Fulbright Scholar at the Brookings Institution and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Australian National University. He studies well-being from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a particular focus on well-being and public policy.

  
  

  
  

  
  

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• ISQOLS WEBINAR: "Be Happy: Navigating Normative Issues in Behavioural and Well-Being Public Policy"

  • When
    1 Oct 2020
  •  
    8:00 AM (PDT)
  • Location
    Online Webinar

  Register

  ISQOLS WEBINAR

  "Be Happy: Navigating Normative Issues in Behavioural and Well-Being Public Policy"

  THURSDAY

  OCTOBER 1

  08:00 AM Pacific Time/

  11:00 AM Eastern Time

  4:00pm/16:00 GMT

  
  

  ****

  FREE 

  Psychological science is increasingly influencing public policy. Behavioural public policy (BPP) was a milestone in this regard because it influenced many areas of policy in a general way. Well-being public policy (WPP) is emerging as a second domain of psychological science with general applicability. However, advocacy for WPP is criticised on ethical and political grounds. These criticisms are reminiscent of those directed at BPP over the past decade. This déjà vu suggests the need for interdisciplinary work that establishes normative principles for applying psychological science in public policy. We try to distil such principles for WPP from the normative debates over BPP. We argue that the uptake of BPP by governments was a function of its relatively strong normative and epistemic foundations in libertarian paternalism, or “nudging”, for short. We explain why the nudge framework is inappropriate for WPP. We then analyse how “boosts” offers a strict but feasible alternative framework for substantiating the legitimacy of well-being (and behavioural) policies. We illuminate how some WPPs could be fruitfully promoted as boosts and how they might fall short of the associated criteria.

  
  

  Presented by:  Dr. Mark Fabian

  Mark Fabian is a Research Associate (Postdoc) at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge. He was previously a Fulbright Scholar at the Brookings Institution and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Australian National University. He studies well-being from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a particular focus on well-being and public policy.

  
  

  
  

  
  

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• ISQOLS WEBINAR: "Scale Norming Makes Welfare Analysis with Life Satisfaction Scales Difficult: Theory and Empirical Evidence"

  • When
    2 Oct 2020
  •  
    8:00 AM (PDT)
  • Location
    Online Webinar

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  ISQOLS WEBINAR

  "Scale Norming Makes Welfare Analysis with Life Satisfaction Scales Difficult: Theory and Empirical Evidence"

  
  

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2

  08:00 AM Pacific Time/

  11:00 AM Eastern Time

  4:00pm/16:00 GMT

  ****

  FREE 

  Scale norming, sometimes called ‘response shift’, is where respondents use qualitatively different scales to answer the same question across survey waves. It makes responses challenging to compare intertemporally or interpersonally. This paper develops a formal model of the cognitive process that could give rise to scale norming in year on year responses to life satisfaction scale questions. It then uses this model to conceptually differentiate scale norming from adaptation and changes in reference points. Scale norming could make life satisfaction responses misleading with regards to the changing welfare of individuals. In particular, individuals who would say that their life is "improving" or "going well" might nonetheless give the same scale response year after year. This has major implications for the use of scales in cost-benefit analysis and other welfarist applications. While there is already substantial empirical evidence for the existence of scale norming, its implications for welfare analysis are sometimes understated on the grounds that this evidence might simply be the product of errors of memory. The paper presents new empirical evidence for scale norming from two surveys (N1 = 278; N2 = 1050) designed such that errors of memory are an unconvincing explanation for the results.
  

  
  

  Presented by:  Dr. Mark Fabian

  Mark Fabian is a Research Associate (Postdoc) at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge. He was previously a Fulbright Scholar at the Brookings Institution and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Australian National University. He studies well-being from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a particular focus on well-being and public policy.

  
  

  
  

  
  

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• ISQOLS WEBINAR:"Does it matter where it comes from? Happiness and air pollution sources"

  • When
    5 Oct 2020
  •  
    7:30 AM (PDT)
  • Location
    Online Webinar

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  ISQOLS WEBINAR

  "Does it matter where it comes from?

  Happiness and air pollution sources"

  
  

  MONDAY

  OCTOBER 5

  7:30am Pacific Time

  3:30pm/15:30 UK time (GMT+1

  ****

  FREE 

  The adverse effects of air pollution on human health are well documented in the clinical, epidemiological and toxicological literatures. People in their everyday lives and industrial activity contribute to the creation of air pollution, but overall air pollution affects people regardless of how it is produced, unless the pollutant agent differs. However, does is affect people’s well-being differently depending on how it is produced? In this paper I study whether changes in air pollution from different sources have a heterogeneous impact on people's life satisfaction, and I analyse the incentives individuals face to abate emissions.

  To do this I propose a model of household's choices of avoidance behaviours and use to analyse how differently-targeted policies affect households choices regarding air pollution. Later I perform an empirical study in a developing economy context. For the empirical work I use subjective well-being (SWB) measures to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) for reductions of air pollution, procedure known as the Life Satisfaction Approach. I use data from the Chilean Pollutant Release and Transfer Register, which appoints air pollution to different sources, and merge it with individual-level socio-demographic information from the Chilean household survey. Preliminary results show that life satisfaction is negatively related to air pollution generated by transport and firms, but that the externalities they receive from generating air pollution in a household outweigh its negative health consequences.

  Presented by:  Veronica Vienne

  
  

  Veronica Vienne is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. She has an MSc Economics from the same university and did her undergraduate studies in Chile. Her research interests are environmental economics and well-being studies. her current research projects focus on pollution and climate change, and their effects on well-being and children's socioemocional development, respectively.

  
  

  
  

  
  

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• ISQOLS WEBINAR: "Exploring the Link Between Walkability and Subjective Wellbeing in Detroit Metro Area"

  • When
    16 Oct 2020
  •  
    12:00 PM (PDT)
  • Location
    Online Webinar

  Register

  ISQOLS WEBINAR:

  "Exploring the Link Between Walkability and Subjective Wellbeing in Detroit Metro Area"

  
  

  MONDAY

  OCTOBER 16

  
  

  12:00 PM

  Pacific Time

  3:00 PM/15:00

  Eastern Time

  ****

  FREE 

  Walkability as a concept in urban planning is emerging since neighborhoods are less walkable and people are more dependent on their automobile today. On the research front, there is enough literature on the health benefits of walkability but the relation between walkability and subjective wellbeing remains understudied. The webinar will show the wellbeing effects of walking behavior of individuals living in Detroit metropolitan area. In addition to walking behavior, the research also focused on the activity of walking in the presence of neighborhood aesthetics like greenness, crime, streets maintenance which might alleviate positive or aggravate negative emotions while performing the act of walking.

  
  

  Presented by: Aditi Manke

  Aditi Manke is a 5th year PhD. candidate in Public Affairs at Rutgers University-Camden. Her main research interest lies in looking at the commute patterns undertaken by people for work and how it intersects with their subjective wellbeing. While working towards her thesis, she came across another dimension to commute which is built environment and how it shapes our walking behavior and commute mode choice for work. She recently defended her thesis proposal which focuses on the effects of built environment characteristics, walkability and commute on subjective wellbeing of people residing in Detroit Metro Area, United States. 

  
  

  
  

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