Frozen or malleable? Political ideology in the face of job loss and unemployment

Abstract

To what degree do people adjust their political ideology in response to job loss? To answer this question, we draw on Dutch panel data over the period 2007–2016, paying special attention to the potential moderating role of various personal circumstances. We find that, on average, job loss triggers a leftward ideological response. Although small in size, this shock effect persists when people remain unemployed or find new employment, yet in the longer run it wears off. Furthermore, we find that job loss prompts a bigger shift to the left when people are simultaneously confronted with a major drop in household income, when they have fewer financial resources to serve as a buffer, and when they are more pessimistic about the economy. While we also observe many people who revise their ideology to the right during our study window, these rightward shifts do not seem driven by job loss experiences.

The Declining Middle: Occupational Change, Social Status, and the Populist Right

“…I detail the approach and report the results in the Supplemental Material. In line with the above analysis and comparable recent evaluations based on Dutch data (Gidron & Mijs, 2019; Wiertz & Rodon, 2019), former routine workers who lose their jobs do not show any sign of moving to the right. To the contrary, support for socially conservative parties decreases substantially in Switzerland and to a lesser extent also in the United Kingdom and Germany.…”

“…Once unemployed, actual scarcity of material resources rather than status anxiety is the most salient problem. I expect dropouts to react with an economic response, thus moving away from socially conservative parties and instead supporting the left, which traditionally and credibly promotes a generous social safety net (see also Wiertz & Rodon, 2019).…”

The Declining Middle: Occupational Change, Social Status and the Populist Right

“…I detail the approach and report the results in the Supplementary Material. In line with the above analysis and comparable recent evaluations based on Dutch data (Wiertz & Rodon, 2019;Gidron & Mijs, 2019), former routine workers who lose their jobs do not show any sign of moving to the right. To the contrary, support for socially conservative parties decreases substantially in Switzerland and to a lesser extent also in the UK and Germany.…”

Automation and the future of the welfare state: basic income as a response to technological change?

“…It is no coincidence that this distinction between actual and potential decline features prominently on the research agenda about the consequences of economic changes for radical right party support (Gidron and Hall 2017;Kurer and Palier 2019;Engler and Weisstanner 2020;Kurer 2020), whereas actual job loss moves voters to the left (Wiertz and Rodon 2019). Our study contributes to this debate by showing that individuals whose job is at risk of being automated do not view a universal basic income as a viable remedy.…”