Being Part of Something Larger Makes People Happy, and Voting Every Four Years Is Not It

The happiness literature is a swamp and I want to step into it carefully. Much of what has been published on what makes people happy has not replicated, the measures are self-reports, and the field has been generous to conclusions that flatter its readers. So I will lean on the one finding that seems to survive everything thrown at it.

People report being happier when they are part of something larger than themselves. Kahneman and the researchers who followed him found it repeatedly; the community studies find it; the studies of volunteering, religious congregations and social movements find it. Belonging to a group with a shared purpose, and contributing to that purpose, is one of the few things that reliably moves the needle. Money, past a threshold, does not. Belonging does.

I take that as established enough to build on. Now apply it to politics.

What Political Participation Offers

Belonging to a polity ought to be the largest instance of this. A nation is the biggest thing most people will ever be part of, and its decisions are the most consequential ones they will ever be near.

And yet the participation on offer is a single act, once every few years, in which you choose between two or three bundles assembled by other people, after which your involvement ends. Nothing you decide is yours. Nothing you contributed can be pointed to. The most common feeling reported about the whole business is not belonging; it is frustration, or the shrug of the person who has learned that it does not matter.

If belonging to something larger produces happiness, then the political system is a machine for withholding the largest available source of it. It takes the biggest shared enterprise there is and arranges that almost nobody feels part of it.

Why the Vote Does Not Count as Belonging

The mechanism matters, so let me be precise about what is missing.

Belonging in the happiness studies is not membership on paper. It is participation: doing something, with others, that produces a result you can see. The volunteer at the food bank feels part of the food bank because she sorted the tins and saw them go out. The member of the choir feels part of the choir because he sang and the piece was performed.

The voter has none of that. His single act is aggregated with millions of others into a result he cannot trace to himself, which then licenses people he will never meet to do things he did not choose, for years, without consulting him. That is not participation in the psychological sense. It is closer to being a spectator who was once asked to clap.

Compare a person who has voted, this month, on a specific question, argued about it with people who disagreed, watched the result, and knows what was decided and that her voice was one of the voices. That is the thing the studies describe. It is also a description of direct democracy.

A Benefit Nobody Counts

The arguments for direct democracy are usually about outcomes: better decisions, less capture, dispersed power. I have made most of them elsewhere. This one is different, because it is about the participants rather than the decisions.

Even if direct democracy produced exactly the same decisions as representation (which I do not believe, but grant it), it would still deliver something representation cannot: the experience of being part of the thing that governs you. Not symbolically, on a ballot with a flag on it, but concretely, decision by decision.

If the happiness research is even approximately right, that is a large and free benefit, distributed to everyone, that we currently forgo. And we forgo it while running a system whose defenders talk constantly about the dignity of the citizen. There is no dignity in clapping once every four years.

The Caveat

I do not want to overclaim. Participation also produces conflict, disappointment, and the fatigue of arguing with people who are wrong. Some people will find deciding things a burden and will want to delegate, and they should be able to.

But the option to belong has to exist before anyone can decline it. At present it does not, and we have built the absence of it into the constitution and called it representation.