the grievances triggered by the economic deterioration and the leadership crisis of the mid-2010s. These grievances indicate an erosion in support for the social contract that emerged after the end of the military dictatorship and was shaped since 2002 by the Partido dos Trabalhadores, which dominated Brazilian politics until its electoral loss in 2018. All groups to different extents, especially the middle class (middle 40%), expressed dissatisfaction with their standard of living, reflecting deficits in the quality of public services. The economic crisis and subsequent weak economic growth fueled growing pessimism and fears, especially among people with newly acquired middle-class status, of falling back into poverty. The young and the poor were also dissatisfied with wide-spread corruption, which exacerbated the leadership crisis and further limited the state capacity to deal with the consequences of the economic crisis.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the conceptual framework and the literature on SWB and economic development with a specific focus on Brazil. Section 3 presents the data, variables, and empirical strategy. Section 4 discusses the empirical results, while Section 5 links the results to the outcome of the 2018 general election. Section 6 offers a summary, caveats, and a discussion of policy implications.

# **2. Conceptual framework**

# _2.1. Subjective well-being and experienced welfare_

We use the Cantril ladder scores in the Gallup World Poll to measure SWB or the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his or her own life-as-a-whole favorably. These cognitive measures of SWB, also known as life evaluation<sup>9</sup> measures (Veenhoven, 2000), are generally regarded as valid measures of ‘experienced welfare’ (cf. Senik, 2011) in a country (OECD, 2013; Helliwell et al., 2021). They offer advantages compared to widely used, objective measures of quality of life, such as per capita gross domestic product (GDP), income or expenditure from household surveys, the Human Development Index, and multidimensional poverty measures.

SWB measures capture how people evaluate the quality of their own lives, while traditional, objective measures reflect the livability of the environment or the presence of opportunities to live a good life. This distinction is important because opportunities do not necessarily materialize in life; likewise, people are sometimes able to thrive in adverse circumstances. Thus, increased income or expenditures need not indicate rising experienced welfare and increased welfare need not reflect increased incomes or expenditure. In sum, traditional economic indicators may not be able to accurately track changes in experienced welfare (Arampatzi et al., 2018).

Despite criticism by economists that SWB measures have limited validity and reliability (e.g., Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2001), recent work in behavioral and happiness economics has shown that these measures complement well objective indicators as they provide information that is useful and cannot be obtained from objective data sources (Deaton, 2008; Ravallion, 2012). First, the use of specific objective quality-of-life indicators disregards the fact that people may value differently the opportunities for a good life. These indicators do not capture people’s preferences on the extent to which objective conditions translate into outcomes of a good life (Veenhoven, 2000; 2002). According to Deaton (2008), objective aggregate measures, such as per capita GDP, reflect the subjective opinions of analysts and policy makers of what makes a good quality of life (Deaton, 2008). The assumption being that improvements in the average level of income in a country should lead to welfare increases for its citizens. Multidimensional quality-of-life measures can provide a solution because they cover non-monetary areas that matter to experienced welfare but are omitted from traditional welfare indicators based only on aggregate GDP or household income or expenditures. However, weighing the different aspects can be challenging when constructing an

> 9 Alternatively, SWB is also referred to as life satisfaction.

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