Social Tension and Happiness: Evidence from Europe

In the wake of large inflows of migrants to Europe, large tensions between groups in European societies occurred. However this effort on subjective well-being is still under reported in previous literature. This paper makes an effort and assesses the impact of social tension on subjective well-being. We use the European Quality of Life Survey database (EQLS) and construct an ordered logit model to determine the relationship between social tension and subjective well-being. The results show that social tension has a significant negative effect on happiness and life satisfaction. These results were robust throughout different specifications. Weaker or minority groups like foreigners or migrants could be more vulnerable when tension between groups in society are high. However in this paper we find that happiness levels were not significantly different for citizens and foreigners.