Work, Political Participation, and Inequality in the U.S.

• In Event: How the Rich Control Government

Abstract

Political participation is an important mechanism through which citizens affect policy outcomes. However, to date, nearly all research on political participation in American politics has focused on income and education as predictors of participation. While these factors are important, significant changes in the labor market call attention to the importance of work and employment as factors that affect political engagement. Unfortunately, research in this domain is scarce as few large-scale surveys measure respondents’ occupation. In this paper, we draw on multiple waves of open-ended occupational responses that we have hand coded from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to systematically examine how occupation affects political participation—above and beyond well-known resource-based correlates such as income and education. The findings indicate that individuals working in service jobs such as food services and janitorial services are much less likely to participate in politics than business owners, managers, and professionals. An implication is that on conflictual issues that affect the distribution of power between these individuals—the minimum wage, for example—policymakers are likely to receive stronger signals from more engaged business owners and managers than less engaged front-line workers. In the context of an increasingly unequal U.S. labor market in the U.S. with growing returns for those at the top and growing insecurity for those at the bottom, the findings point to the ways that occupation can explain—and increasingly reinforce—unequal political engagement and political inequality.

Authors

• Gregory Lyon, Georgetown University

• Brian F. Schaffner, Tufts University