Racially Inclusive Governance Makes (Almost) Everyone Happier: The End of Apartheid as Evidence for Procedural Utility
研究南非种族隔离制度终结后生活满意度的提升，发现这种提升并非源于社会经济状况改善，而是源于人们从给定结果中获得的幸福感变化，表明治理过程本身对幸福感有独立影响。
This paper examines the impact of a large social regime change on well-being independently from the change’s direct impact on observable outcomes. While individuals get utility from outcomes, they may also get ‘procedural’ utility from the processes by which outcomes arise. We apply a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to models of life satisfaction before and after the end of apartheid. The results suggest that the increase in life satisfaction seen in South Africa following apartheid’s end should not be attributed to improvements in socioeconomic outcomes, but to changes in the well-being derived from given levels of these outcomes. This suggests that processes and institutions have important impacts on life-satisfaction independently from their direct influence on outcomes.