I would be comparing BRICS countries for the same purpose. I hope this study mentioned by you will help me.

The most influential work was the benchmarking study of a leftist Swedish researcher, who tried to empirically prove that free trade and capitalism was bad for the poorest quintile of societies. He found just the contrary in the data and proved instead, that the rule of law, a capitalistic order and free trade benefits the poorest quintiles in all countries examined. Further, he speculated why this is so and tried to find supporting arguments. The study is about 20 years old and it would be great if someone with knowledge of empirical methods in national economies could redo it.

JOHANN NORBERG: In Defense of Global Capitalism, The Cato Institute, 2003, updated edition (https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Capitalism-Norberg-Institute-Defence/dp/1930865473/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520934977&sr=8-1&keywords=johan+norberg+defence+of+global+capitalism&dpID=51Cv%252BvHg-1L&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch)

@Peters thank you for your kind information and I must be considering the inputs given by you.

Hi Suraj,

The following is a good study that examines the correlation between democracy/political participation and individual well-being.

Ann L. Owen, Julio Videras and Christina Willemsen, "Democracy, Participation, and life Satisfaction" Social Science Quarterly Vol. 89, No. 4

I do think, however, that measuring democracy in itself is insufficient in studying subjective well-being. I would personally suggest including economic factors as well (employment, income, access to healthcare, etc.).

These would elucidate the contradictions embedded in contemporary liberal democracies even in the Western world (think here of the US as an example!).

Thank you Alejandra for your valuable suggestions and I will definitely consider the other social, economic and demographic factors influencing well being of individuals.

I have one more query that how should I approach to select the countries as types of government and rulling differ when it comes to BRICS countries.

That is an interesting question, Suraj.

In terms of form of government, certainly the BRICS are a heterogenous mix. What is certain is that non of them fit within what would be categorized as a Western liberal democracy in the traditional sense.

Organizations like Freedom House (https://freedomhouse.org/) and the Electoral Integrity Project have scored BRICS as follows for the 2012-1017 period in terms of electoral integrity (please note that 'democracy' as a whole, in the 'beyond-electoral sense' is ignored by these statistics):

Brazil: scored 68 PEI Index

Russia: scored 44 PEI Index

India: scored 59 PEI Index

China: was not scored since the study deems there are no free and fair elections.

South Africa: scored 63 PEI index

Note: 60+ means Very high/high electoral integrity, 50-59 means Moderate, Less than 50 means Low/Very low.

I hope you find this useful for your research.

Thank you Alejandra for this valuable information and as I see here including China in my sample is the most difficult part when it comes to justification of the results or may be my hypothesis that "democratic values affect individual's Life satisfaction" be highly significant in case of China.

Definitely, I would be considering you when I got the regression results and in case any undesirable answers I will approach.

Absolutely! This is an empirically challenging yet very relevant study, Suraj.

Looking forward to hearing about the results of your study when you have them ready and please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like me to comment on your progress.

Kind regards,

Hello everyone,

I have been working on this topic and I find very interesting results. I have stablished the positive relationship between level of democracy/ freedom of choice & control over one's and level of life satisfaction but the same ordinal logistic regression tells that individuals with Right wing ideology are more satisfied than those who believe in Left wing. This is contradictory as Right wing is generally known as conservatives and Leftist give more importance to freedom.

Help me out of this puzzle.

Hello connections,

Here I am with a publication where I tried to answer some of the questions asked earlier. This work is dedicated to all of you who kept on answering my questions.

Thank you very much for your suggestions.