No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Reported levels of household life satisfaction, also referred to as subjective well-being, increased dramatically in South Africa following the end of Apartheid. This study uses household surveys from 1993-1994 and 1998 in South Africa to investigate why. Models of subjective well-being are estimated following previous literature and a Oaxaca decomposition is then applied, which allows subjective well-being and the determinants of subjective well-being to be examined in a new framework. The decomposition determines what portion of the life satisfaction increase in South Africa is due to improvements in living conditions and what portion is due to changes in the way certain factors reward life satisfaction. The results suggest that fully 92.9 percent of the increase in life satisfaction is due to changes in the reward from the factors considered, not to improvements in living conditions. The results suggest that the determinants of subjective well-being can change substantially over time, and that changes in governmental and social systems can be as or more important than more commonly considered determinants of subjective well-being.

This study considers the impact of community-level inequality of income and education on the ways individuals participate in local government and community development activities. It adapts the standard identity-augmented utility model to demonstrate that, given the choice to participate or not to participate, increases in inequality can decrease overall group participation, and an individual's distance from the characteristics of an ideal community member can also decrease the benefits and likelihood of participation. The theory predicts, however, that increasing the responsiveness of civic bodies to input from citizens can mitigate the negative effects of inequality. Original survey data from a stratified random sample of over 680 Missoula households are then analyzed to test the implications of the theory. In Missoula, people have 3 participation options: not participating at all, participating alone (by writing letters or watching meetings on television), or participating in person. A multinomial logit model to estimate the probability of choosing a certain outcome shows that people living in neighborhoods characterized by high inequality are less likely to drop out, but more likely to participate alone. This effect is most pronounced under high educational inequality.