When we examine the quality of life for each individual, several specific dimensions need to be considered. Health conditions and quality of family relationships are critical. When the individual in question is married, his/her marital quality is important. When he/she has a job, subjective assessment of that job is important. Social relationships regarding friends, neighbors, colleagues, relatives, etc. may be critical also. Although the quality of life is more than the sum of qualities of these specific areas of one's life, it is still determined to a great extent by the qualities of these sub-areas, including marital and family relationships (Proulx et al., 2007).

This article examines whether democracy affects quality of life. Scholars have conducted surveys to investigate whether democracy is likely to lead to good quality of life. There are two contested views to the relationship: some suggest that democracy has a positive causal effect on quality of life, whereas others contend that democracy does not play such a role. Previous findings are supported by cross-national statistical analysis with aggregated survey data. However, aggregated survey data may cause ecological fallacy. Also, in order to ascertain the extant research, it would be beneficial to test the hypothesis by incorporating both individual- and country-level variables. Therefore, this paper applied hierarchical modeling to investigate the regularity. Both individual-level perception of democracy and country-level political regime data were incorporated in our empirical model. Our findings suggest that individual-level satisfaction with democracy has positive causal effect on one's quality of life, whereas the country-level characteristic of the political regime has no effect.

Our paper reports and discusses issues relating to subjective wellbeing in selected countries in ASEAN (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations), a regional organization that coordinates and promotes the economic, social and cultural interests of member countries in Southeast Asia. Comparisons will be made across the five founding members of ASEAN, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand using data from the 2004, 2006 and 2007 AsiaBarometer Surveys. The indicators of subjective wellbeing used are perceptions of happiness, enjoyment, and achievement. We also examined the impact of selected demographic and non-demographic variables on these indicators.

This article attempts to answer why some countries experience the recurrence of civil war and others do not. One of the most significant differences between civil war onset and its recurrence is that the latter has once experienced termination of civil war, while the former has not. To find the cause of recurrence, this article examines how different war termination types influence the duration of post-civil war peace. Duration analysis of the civil wars between 1944 and 1999 shows that military victory, supported by peacekeeping operations or power-sharing arrangements, leads to the most durable peace in a post-civil war country. Contrary to the accepted wisdom, negotiated peace settlement, even when supported by peacekeeping operations or power-sharing arrangements, is not positively related to post-conflict peace.

Within a one-dimensional spatial framework, we deduce that parties’ incentives ‘to go negative’, by blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values, increase with their ideological proximity. We test our hypothesis by considering the long period of no-cabinet alternation that characterized both Italy and Japan. In particular, we focus on the (spatial) incentives of the Italian Communist Party and of the Japanese Socialist Party to emphasize on a particular topic related to negative campaigning, i.e. political corruption issues. The status of the perennial opposition held by both parties, together with the existence of several political corruption scandals during the period considered, makes the Italian and the Japanese political systems particularly apt to test our hypothesis. The results, based on data derived from electoral programs, support our theoretical insights.