In this paper, we contribute to the debate on life-satisfaction gap between the citizens of post-socialist countries of Europe and Asia and their highly developed OECD counterparts, by examining the influence of de jure and de facto respect for empowerment rights. We mainly focus on the measure of rights protection called de jure - de facto rights protection gap. The empowerment rights included in the analysis are: the freedom of association, the freedom of expression, the freedom of religion, the freedom of foreign movement. Our results imply that government’s respect for these rights plays the role in diminishing happiness gap. We base the conclusions on an empirical study conducted on the sample of more than 59,000 observations. The data used for the study consist of World Values Survey database (waves 3–6) and a number of socio-economic indicators for 44 countries.