Public–private political cleavage: what happens after retirement?

Abstract

Political preferences of public employees differ from those of workers in the private sector. The former are more likely to vote for left-wing parties and orient themselves ideologically towards the left. This political cleavage can be understood as the result of occupational incentives, or alternatively, as ideological self-selection whereby individuals favoring government solutions seek employment in the public sector. We test the selection hypothesis by estimating the effects of public versus private occupational sector on political preferences before and after retirement. The data are from the Norwegian Election Surveys and cover nine national elections between 1977 and 2009. The research design addresses a series of cross-sectional data and the key challenge of endogenous retirement is handled with instrumental variables. Party choice, ideological orientation, and public spending preferences are shown to change following retirement, and former private and public employees converge. The results reject selection based on 'hard-wired' political preferences.

Public Employees as Politicians: Evidence from Close Elections

“…One reason for the difference is that professional background determines socioeconomic conditions and may thus shape identity (Braendle and Stutzer 2016). Consistent with this, public sector employees seem to be politically more active (Bhatti and Hansen 2012) and lean more to the left ideologically (Knutsen 2005; Jensen, Sum, and Flynn 2009; Rattsø and Sørensen 2016). They may also be relatively unwilling to support market-oriented solutions, and thus, a smaller public sector.…”

“…This raises the obvious question of why municipal employees’ information advantage leads to increased—and not to decreased—spending and only in their own sector of employment. These results also speak against the interpretation that municipal employees increase spending because they generally prefer a larger public sector (Knutsen 2005; Jensen, Sum, and Flynn 2009; Rattsø and Sørensen 2016). Finally, we would like to point out that intraparty bargaining—for which we already provided support earlier—is an example of an indirect mechanism that could generate the observed sector specific effects: Given that councilors with municipal employment cannot be members of the subcommittee of their own sector, they have to influence sector-specific spending indirectly.…”

Closer to the state, closer to the polls? The different impact of corruption on turnout among public employees and other citizens

“…Public-sector employees turn out to vote more, even after controlling for their socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics (Corey and Garand, 2002). Moreover, the policy preferences of public employees change after retirement, converging with the preferences of non-public-sector workers (Rattsø and Sørensen, 2016). This finding clearly challenges the assumption that the higher turnout rate among public employees is only due to a ‘selection bias’ in their recruitment, whereby individuals having distinct political preferences and being more likely to vote are attracted to public-sector jobs.…”

United We Stand? A Household Perspective On The Impact of Public Employment on Attitudes towards Retrenchment of Welfare Spending

“…Most articles that systematically study this premise have, however, not fared well. Most of the studies within this subfield have not found any meaningful difference between publicly and privately employed, and even there the effects were limited to specific countries and sectors of the publicly employed (Blais and Dion, 1991;Garand et al, 1991;Goul Andersen, 1992;Svallfors, 1997;Dolan, 2002;Rattsø and Sørensen, 2016). This is quite surprising given the central role of this idea in the literature on support for the welfare state.…”