Does good local governance improve subjective well-being?

The goal of this research is to examine the effects of good management of local governments on individual subjective well-being (SWB). We define three dimensions of good governance at the municipal level: accountability, government efficiency and control of corruption. We use a large survey of individual welfare carried out in Spain in 2013 and 2018 and distinguish four potential drivers of SWB: socio-demographic fac-tors, material conditions, quality of life and municipal governance. Individual QoL variables, such as social connections or health status are major drivers of SWB. To a lesser extent, the material conditions also have a significant impact. With respect to good governance, our results point to an immediate positive effect of gov-ernment efficiency on individual SWB levels. In contrast, accountability, understood as transparency, does not seem to have a significant impact. Surprisingly, we find no immediate effect of corruption on reported SWB, but a very strong deferred impact. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. on behalf of AEDEM. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)