Speculative theory of political participation and happiness
A speculative theory:
Current politics is making people increasingly miserable because at a participatory level it has become for many people, on the margin, a more national, more electoral, and more passive activity. All three of these trends are bad for your political happiness return-on-investment.
The first dimension above is scope. All else equal, people get more satisfaction engaging in local politics, where they have more investment in the community, have personal relationships with other participants, and can see more tangible results. This is particularly true of hyper-local politics—PTA meetings, youth sports organizations, neighborhood associations, etc—where many people don’t even think of what they are doing as politics.
The second dimension is instrumentality. All else equal, people are happier participating in legislative policy-making and executive governance than in the instrumental prerequisites to get to those aspects of politics, namely campaigns and elections of representatives. That is, decision-making has a higher happiness/anger ratio than election with.
The third dimension is nature of engagement. All else equal, active participation makes people happier than passive participation. Volunteering for a campaign, meeting with elected officials, becoming a decision-maker, attending meetings, and organizing people are all active ways to participate. Donating money, reading news, and complaining to friends are all passive ways of participating. Much of this is related to, and downstream from, Eitan Hersh’s excellent Politics is for Power.
Contemporary trends in media, technology, and civil society—most importantly the rise of cable news and social media, and the decline of local news and in-person civic associations—have shifted people on the margins away from local-active-governance forms of political participation and toward national-passive-electoral forms of political participation. On the margins, complaining about Trump and sending $50 to Kamala Harris has increased and attending the budget meeting in the church basement has decreased.
There are lots of interaction effects here. A nationalized political outlook almost demands a passive and more instrumental form of participation; hyper-local participation often involves no electoral participation at all.