Abstract
In Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) well-being can be defined as the freedom of choice to achieve the things in life which one
has reason to value most for his or her personal life. Capabilities are in Sen’s vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people
have or the opportunities available to them. In this paper we examine the impact of capabilities alongside choices on well-being.
There is a lot of theoretical work on Sen’s capability framework but still a lack of empirical research in measuring and testing
his capability model especially in a dynamic perspective. The contribution of the paper is first to test Sen’s theoretical
CA approach empirically using 25 years of German and 18 years of British data. Second, to examine to what extent the capability
approach can explain long-term changes in well-being and third to view the impact on subjective as well as objective well-being
in two clearly distinct welfare states. Three measures of well-being are constructed: life satisfaction for subjective well-being
and relative income and employment security for objective well-being. We ran random and fixed effects GLS models. The findings
strongly support Sen’s capabilities framework and provide evidence on the way capabilities, choices and constraints matter
for objective and subjective well-being. Capabilities pertaining to human capital, trust, altruism and risk taking, and choices
to family, work-leisure, lifestyle and social behaviour show to strongly affect long-term changes in subjective and objective
well-being though in a different way largely depending on the type of well-being measure used.
has reason to value most for his or her personal life. Capabilities are in Sen’s vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people
have or the opportunities available to them. In this paper we examine the impact of capabilities alongside choices on well-being.
There is a lot of theoretical work on Sen’s capability framework but still a lack of empirical research in measuring and testing
his capability model especially in a dynamic perspective. The contribution of the paper is first to test Sen’s theoretical
CA approach empirically using 25 years of German and 18 years of British data. Second, to examine to what extent the capability
approach can explain long-term changes in well-being and third to view the impact on subjective as well as objective well-being
in two clearly distinct welfare states. Three measures of well-being are constructed: life satisfaction for subjective well-being
and relative income and employment security for objective well-being. We ran random and fixed effects GLS models. The findings
strongly support Sen’s capabilities framework and provide evidence on the way capabilities, choices and constraints matter
for objective and subjective well-being. Capabilities pertaining to human capital, trust, altruism and risk taking, and choices
to family, work-leisure, lifestyle and social behaviour show to strongly affect long-term changes in subjective and objective
well-being though in a different way largely depending on the type of well-being measure used.
- Content Type Journal Article
- Pages 1-27
- DOI 10.1007/s11205-011-9978-3
- Authors
- Ruud Muffels, Department of Sociology/ReflecT, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
- Bruce Headey, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, Melbourne University, 801 Swanston St, Parkville, Melbourne, VIC 3052, Australia
- Journal Social Indicators Research
- Online ISSN 1573-0921
- Print ISSN 0303-8300