Civil Society, Political Participation and Happiness

Mounting public debt at national, regional and municipal levels is the lament of the day heard from Athens to Rome, from Washington to Tokyo, from Duisburg to Remscheid. Governments are more and more constrained in the services they can provide as annual interest payments on debt keep rising. Under the circumstances the social commitment of private actors, be they corporations or citizens, becomes ever more important. Other than altruistic philanthropy, what are the incentives underlying civic involvement? Recent findings in the field of happiness studies suggest that people who engage in community service and contribute in other ways to society are happier than those who do not get involved. However, beyond this conspicuous correlation little is known about the conditions and specific motivations of this kind of behaviour, and much is still to be learnt about how individual life satisfaction is influenced by social awareness, trust in institutions, etc. and social commitment.

While the determinants and correlates of well-being have been a topic of research in the interdisciplinary field of happiness studies for many years now, the number of studies which take political participation and civic engagement into account is – in spite of the recent surge for happiness – still rather limited. Although these topics have been studied in traditional disciplines like sociology, psychology and political science, the studies in those fields, however, often neglect happiness and social well-being in their analysis. The intention of this sympoium was, by bringing together a select group of experts from the fields of happiness studies, economics, sociology and political science, to shed light on the complex interconnectedness of civil society, political participation and life satisfaction in the functioning and development of society.
The findings of the workshop will be published in a special issue of the journal “Voluntas” late 2014.