Abstract
The paper tests whether the well-being cost of own unemployment is higher in individualistic countries and among persons with more individualistic orientations. I consider two dimensions of individualism: family support and self-reliance. I adopt a multilevel regression methodology on data of the European Values Study (2008) for 42 European countries. The results confirm that in Europe individualism correlates with higher well-being cost of own unemployment. Specifically, the relationship between unemployment and well-being is moderated by the family support norm. Its effect size is substantial, similar to the effect of country unemployment rate. This paper is the first one to establish in a comparative context that the well-being cost of own unemployment is higher in individualistic countries. It is also the first one to investigate the mechanisms behind this regularity. In contrast to the theoretical predictions, the importance of personal orientations is much weaker than the one of normative factors. Consistently with previous literature, the results suggest that the support among family members depends more on social norms than on individual values.
Highlights
In individualist societies, where everyone is considered responsible for their own lives, well-being depends largely on individual success (Diener et al 1995)
Its significant intercept (var(_cons)) justifies using multilevel methodology: the country-level variation accounts for 12 % of the total variation unexplained by the model
The coefficients for the country family support norm and for country self-reliance norm are insignificant, which differs from the results previously reported by Diener et al (1995) that people in individualist countries are happier
Summary
In individualist societies, where everyone is considered responsible for their own lives, well-being depends largely on individual success (Diener et al 1995). Being unemployed is a sign of (at least temporary) lack of success, individualist culture may increase the well-being cost of unemployment. It is well established that unemployed persons have lower subjective well-being than employed ones (Helliwell 2003; Lucas et al 2004; Pittau et al 2010). The negative effect of unemployment on well-being is stronger than what can be attributed to the loss of income (Helliwell and Putnam 2004; Brereton et al 2008; Winkelmann and Winkelmann 1998), which shows that employment has non-financial, psychological benefits (Warr and Jackson 1987)
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