Less happiness, more political interactions?—Cross-country evidence of the interrelations between political interactions and self-reported lack of happiness

Abstract This paper explores how individual self-reported unhappiness interrelates with political interactions. We focus on three types of activities: participating in political debates, encouraging others to vote, and motivating fellow citizens to act politically. Contrary to theoretical expectations and the empirical claims of previous studies, the results of our multilevel logistic regression analysis on World Values Survey data from 2017 and 2021 show that general unhappiness positively correlates with engagement in political interactions. Our analysis provides evidence that overall unhappy individuals are more likely to influence political information flow in their networks than those who report moderate and higher happiness levels. This finding infers that the unhappy mental state does not necessarily correlate with withdrawal from political conversations, self-isolation, and scarcity of political interaction. Conversely, unhappiness is likely to trigger a higher number of interpersonal exchanges on political matters. Suggesting that the relationship between unhappiness and participation may be more complex than previously assumed, our results contribute to related studies by demonstrating that unhappiness does not create solitary citizenry: unhappy people are among the influential citizens politically.