Cleavages at Work: Skill Segregation in the Knowledge Economy

• In Event: Political Economy, Knowledge and Inequalities

Abstract

Since the end of WWII, highly-educated voters in rich democracies have become increasingly likely to vote for parties of the left. A large body of scholarship has linked this trend to the emergence of a new “values-based” dimension in political conflict, pitting highly-educated cosmopolitans against less-educated nationalists.

What are the underlying causes of this shift? In contrast to prevailing theories that emphasise “top down” changes in party positioning, this paper takes a “bottom up” perspective. In the knowledge economy, workers are increasingly segregated across workplaces according to skill. For example, in the UK, the proportion of high-skilled workers at workplaces specialising in non-routine cognitive work rose sharply from 16% in 1998 to 31% in 2011 (Cortes and Salvatori, 2019).

In this paper I document the rise in skill segregation and the changing educational cleavage across a range of rich democracies. In particular, I show that the changing educational cleavage in voting behaviour has been accompanied by remarkable stability in the educational cleavage in attitudes. Drawing on work from social psychology, I develop a theory in which workplace segregation shapes voting behaviour by changing the salience of different issue dimensions.

Author

• Sophie Hill, Harvard University