Kathryn, of course your ever-wise reader is correct: most of the reasons we are happy or unhappy have nothing to do with our politics.

When bad things happen to us in our real life, we aren’t too happy about it. But the really interesting thing is that “bad events” probably have less to do than we imagine or predict with our internal sense of satisfaction. Most people predict that losing the use of both arms and both legs would make us REALLY unhappy. And in the short-term it does. But after about a year of adjustment quadriplegics are about as happy after the accident as they were before.

This research controls for income and marital status and even religious practice (I would have predicted the latter two pretty much explained the “conservatives are happier” phenomena). But even after controlling for these factors, conservatives are happier than liberals.

This doesn’t mean conservatism makes people happy, as your reader suggests its more likely the things that make you happier make you more likely to identify with conservatism.

One of those things, I propose is a sense that you are captain of your own fate. It isn’t that this is true entirely, but it is the case that people who feel that way are happier than people who look outside themselves for explanations of success or failure.

A second explanation: being the kind of person who is occupied (or preoccupied) with questions of fairness means you are likely to be less happy than the kind of person not so occupied (or preoccupied). Just my guess in terms of politics and happiness, but it dovetails with a pretty consistent body of research on happiness.