Various studies have demonstrated that while the lower educated support economic redistribution more than the higher educated do, they nonetheless dislike welfare support for immigrants more strongly. This paper aims to explain this remarkably particularistic application of the principle of economic egalitarianism (‘welfare chauvinism’) by testing three theories by means of survey data representative of the Dutch population ( N = 1972). The first theory asserts that the low level of political competence of the lower educated is responsible, the second focuses on their weak economic position, and the third claims that their limited amount of cultural capital is decisive. Only the latter explanation is confirmed and implications for debates about ethnocentrism, deservingness and welfare state legitimacy, as well as the ideological profile of the lower-educated working class are discussed.
We study atypical workers’ experiences with voice of in the Netherlands. We take a relational approach to worker voice and hypothesize that atypical workers are particularly vulnerable to refrain from voice and to experience suppression. We test our hypotheses using unique data on workers’ actual experiences with voicing discontent and supervisors’ responses (N = 4708; collected in 2017 and 2018). We find that temporary and freelance work, job insecurity, replaceability and precarious values are barriers to worker voice. Job insecurity and precarious values are associated with less support and more suppression from supervisors. These insights offer a valuable contribution to scholarly and public debates on atypical work by demonstrating how it not only affects workers’ job security, income stability and entitlements but also reduces workers’ ability to speak up and solve problems at work.
This study is the first to explore the effect of political socialization in the workplace on populist attitudes. We investigate the effect of workplace voice suppression on employees' populist attitudes and voting. We expect employees who were suppressed by supervisors to hold more populist attitudes and to be more likely to vote for a populist party than employees who were not. We argue that some employees experience voice suppression by supervisors as stressful, so splitting is likely to be employed as a defense mechanism. Splitting is achieved through cognitive distinction and antagonism between “the good workers” and “the crooked bosses.” Such a split mental framework can generalize into a worldview that contrasts “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” a core characteristic of populism. We predict that the extent to which suppression triggers splitting and consequentially incites populist attitudes and voting depends on employees' acceptance of power distance. We test our hypotheses using SEM on survey data from 2990 members of the Dutch labor force. Our results show that experiences of voice suppression are positively related to populist attitudes and populist voting. As expected, this effect is stronger for employees who are less accepting of power distance.
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